Akin to the pride men often take in their conceits and foibles, to the disparagement of their real worth, is the strange fatality by which many of our best writers have longed after achievements most alien to their genius; so that we may say of none more emphatically than of the race of authors, happy are they who at once know their vocation and are enabled to follow it. Sometimes fortunate chance has restricted their performance to that work of which they are truly masters, and we have been saved from Ovid’s tragedies, and Pope’s “Epic Poem,” and Coleridge’s “Magnum Opus:” but we are every now and then obliged to forgive and forget much on which the author set his chiefest store. Had not Goethe been better without his theory of light, Dryden and Fielding without their bad plays? Did not Tobias Smollet write a history, and, to name a great man after a small one, have we not had too many “Ecclesiastical Sonnets”



from the revered poet of the Lakes himself? But, to come to our application, there is nothing in which the result of such a mistaken tendency is more manifest than in the flood of Dramas we have had poured upon us during the last six years, by writers who, with various shades of wisdom or folly, have shown themselves to be anything rather than dramatists. The conception seems to have taken hold of their minds, that no one now-a-days can be a full-fledged poet until he has written something in the shape of a play; and so, impatient of gradual ascent, our recent rhymers have commonly given us their first efforts in this form. Several of those may be dismissed to a quiet oblivion; but there are others whose luxuriant imagination, broad sympathies, and refined perception have been only cramped by the uncongenial form in which they have endeavoured to unfold them. Those poets are, for the most part, either didactic or lyrical, and the freest and best expressions of their thought are, with few exceptions, as far as possible removed from that which is dramatic. They paint scenery with a pencil dipped in all the hues of nature; they describe feeling, often with exquisite truth; but there is little or no action in the writings of what we may call our last generation of singers. Their works will live rather for the beautiful they contain than as being beautiful or true themselves. So it is with “Festus,” that wilderness of philosophy and foam, of wisdom and absurdity—“the Life Drama,” with its deep passion, luxuriant colouring, and occasional rant; and so it is pre-eminently with “Balder,” where we do not know whether more to admire the exquisite tenderness of some passages, or to recoil from the atrocious bad taste of others. Mr. Bailey combines the descriptive with the lyrical power; witness his picture of Autumn, and the quiet thoughts it suggests; also that little love song, “Like an Island in a River,” beautiful and simple enough to redeem even his account of creation. Alexander Smith, with less perhaps of reflective power, more rarely offends against the rules of taste than his compeers of the so-called spasmodic school; he has, of them all, the fullest melody, the most concise expression; in the portraiture of nature and of passion alike he has proved himself, in many notable instances, a wonderful master. Mr. Dobell, with whom we have more especially to do, we are happy to say at length under his real name, is eminently a lyrist. Those of our readers who read “the Roman by Sydney Yendys” when it appeared six years ago, will recollect the happy impression it conveyed, that, after a long period of barrenness, we had a new poet once more springing up amongst us. The book was well received and everywhere lauded. The theme chosen was one which was in all hearts, and we were ready to overlook, in our welcome—in our appreciation of its beauties



and harmony, the real defects of the book. These were, however, too considerable long to escape notice; the song was not, after all, felt to be adequate to the subject. Under the name of a drama, it was a long monologue, redeemed from tediousness by the enthusiasm of rhetoric rather than the inspiration of more genuine poetry. The images were strung together too much like beads upon a thread. There was little practical aim, and less positive achievement, in the issue of the book. We remember it now, in connexion with one or two striking descriptions—that of the Coliseum for instance—and a number of melodious chaunts sung by minstrels, dancers, soldiers, and that indefatigable monk, the rather obtrusive hero of the piece. Among those, that which opens the volume, a sweet measure “full of love notes”—“There went an incense through the land one night”—“O Lila, round our early love”—the war chorus of the Milanese, “Who would drone on in a dull world like this”—and the warbling of the children sporting by the doorway, are fine enough to make the whole book worth reading. But there is nowhere action, variety, or character: where alone there is any effort towards dramatic effect, in the scene between Francisca and the Monk, it is a confessed failure.

Four years passed before the appearance of “Balder,” during which time a tide set in, bringing us a whole shoal of verses, good, bad, and indifferent, all marked by a strong subjective tendency. Longfellow had given us his “Golden Legend,” Frederick Tennyson his “Days and Hours,” and Matthew Arnold his adaptations from the Greek. The whole spasmodic school had sprung into existence; we had had “The Life Drama”—Gerald Massey—“Night and the Soul”—Poems by Quallon—hosts of rhapsodies, as vague as dreams, and not half so natural; plays of the new order, where some one talked about his feelings and fate, through scores of dreary pages, with “a pause,” “a long pause,” and “a very long pause;” or held parley with the most patient of beauties, in most interminable dialogues, broken up by most unmeaning ditties. And, lowest depth of all, we had another volume of Mr. Gilfillan’s critiques! No wonder then that we begun to cry enough, and were in no very favourable mood to receive a new edition of Hamlet, with all the other parts omitted. Strong prepossession in his favour at once gave a certain currency to Mr. Dobell’s new volume, but it soon received a very general sentence of condemnation. Many, following the guidance of the author’s friends, or led by that malicious chance which invariably directs a stray reader to the very worst passages, got hold of the abominable pictures of war and pestilence, and, naturally enough, shut the book; others fell asleep in the middle of some speech, and forgot where to begin again; many more valiantly read and read, and “found no end in wondering mazes lost.” Yet, with all its want of taste, nay more, of common sense, “Balder” is a poem of a far higher order than “The Roman;” it contains thoughts and feelings which belong to a mind more matured, and are the result of a clearer insight. If its defects are glaring, its beauties are often most subtle. We cannot now enlarge on either; suffice it to say, that in some passages he has touched with a master hand upon some of the deepest chords of human nature. We can never forget the suggestive description of the village bride, pp. 13, 14; or of England and her mighty dead, pp. 92, 93. Part of the sketch of Chamouny and the long glorious summer day remain fresh in our memories. That picture of Amy too, in scene xxviii, is very lovely, and we recur again and again to her dirges, and feel glad, as we listen to their weary yet winning melody, that we have a poet among us who can express so tenderly the mourning of a woman’s heart. We



read: “The years they come and the years they go,” “If thou wouldst sleep, my babe,” “That I might die and be at rest, O God!” “In the spring twilight,” with many others; and cannot deny the imagination of true genius to the author of “Balder.” But, as a drama, it is nothing, and means nothing other than has been told, far more plainly and therefore far better, long ago. The idea from which the plot takes its rise—the desire to witness death in order to paint it,

• “I cannot stamp
• The face of Death till he hath graven the seal,”

is hideously unnatural, and almost justifies “Firmilian.” That dread angel, in one shape or other, is surely revealed to each one of us soon enough! The end indeed rises into action, and one scene of intense emotion leaves us bewildered on dangerous ground; still to attain this there is much of wilderness to wade through. We turn page after page of fine figures and fair sounding lines and, at the end of each, conclude with the royal Dane, “Words, Words, Words!” so true is it in tragedy,

• “Grown men want thought.
• Thought’s what they mean by verse and seek in verse,
• Boys seek for images and melody.”

Much of the meditation here is fantastic rather than profound: even the most passionate parts are often mere spasms. Balder rages like the red sparkling iron; he has no idea of the white heat that glows in silence. We close the book with a feeling of fatigue, and think we would rather have some “lilt” of Robert Burns, or the “Patriot” or the “Evelyn Hope” of Robert Browning, than the whole mass of it. We wish so much that is beautiful and true were disentangled from so awkward a setting, and therefore the more gladly welcome this new volume in which Mr. Dobell’s genius has been allowed, with fewer fetters, to follow its natural bent.

“England in time of War,” is a series of chaunts, descriptive pieces, sonnets and dramatic lyrics, expressing the various hopes and fears which thrilled through the heart of England, during the late terrible struggle of her sons, in that which she fondly believed to be a battle for right and liberty. The theme is well chosen. Here is a legitimate field for the exercise of those faculties in which Mr. Dobell most excels. There is room for his tenderness and his energy, for the eye of the artist and the insight of the man. We find them all well employed in this volume: the vigour of some passages being only surpassed by the pathos of others, while the beauty of his landscape rivals the truth of those more subtle pictures of emotion which it is the special prerogative of the poet to represent. Mr. Dobell is no vague moralist. He has shown himself, in all his works, as one who sympathizes with freedom everywhere, but keeps his warmest heart for the land in which he dwells. He is generously proud of England: we can believe would be glad either to live or die for her; and so is fitted to write patriotic poems. There is little of politics, in a narrow sense, in this volume, or rather,—except, perhaps, in the “Shower in War Time,”—(an effort to lay the eternal peace question,)—none at all. He dismisses Diplomacy, in a sonnet, rather an ugly one we think, with an oath, and prefers to represent the broad feelings and homely thoughts of men and women, poor soldiers and their wives, to discussing the debates of courts and cabinets. And it may be he is right;—he has avoided the rock of declamation. Was not Goethe’s warning, “Remember politics is not poetry?” Books like this, and the thoughts they suggest, do us good, when we think too much of wars as games of chess, and the men who fight in them as pawns. They help us to remember that in all their checkered fortune they are indeed our fellows, linked to the



earth by the same bonds which connect us, and having an equal stake in their life and death with ourselves. We consider this Mr. Dobell’s most successful work, both in the fuller realization of its aim, and the better taste displayed in individual pieces. There is less of that straining after effect, which sometimes approached near to bombast in “The Roman;” and comparatively little of that wild ejaculation, which as it were made a fool of some of the finest passages in Balder. The feeling throughout is chaste, and the expression generally simple. There is much of graphic portraiture, touching delineation, and comprehensive thought. Some of these strains are surpassed in melody by nothing that has issued from our modern Lyre. It must not however be supposed that the volume is uniform in its excellence; while there are some passages of surpassing beauty on the one hand, there are defects on the other, which indicate the need of yet further culture and discipline. Let us get over those and have done with them. And first, though Scotch ourselves, we decidedly object to the use of the Scottish dialect. None perhaps, wielded by one to whom it is the language of daily life, has more of concentrated power; none is capable of more emphatic pathos; none has more expressive words, or is so full of quaint humour. Our rural districts live in the works of Burns, with vivid reality, as they could in no other language under the sun; hardly one of his songs will endure translation, without losing half its force. Mr. Dobell has felt this, and thought to attain the Doric force of those lyrics, by adopting their language in those of his ballads to which he wished to give a provincial tone. He has been more successful than we should have expected; more so than many natives of our northern towns, who are unused to the country dialect. Some of the pieces thrown into this form, as the “Mother’s Lesson,” are characterized by an energy and suggestiveness which suit well with their dress; but, here and there, he inevitably falls into snares of false expression and absurd application, which give the whole poem an affected if not a ludicrous air. Fancy such lines as this in the “Market Wife’s Song,”

• “And sæ I cry to God— while the hens cackle a!
• And whiddie, whuddie, whaddie gang the auld wheels twa.”

What an ill-advised union of the sacred and the ludicrous have we here! Or this in the Gaberlunzie,

• “His slow steps rouse the blethrin grouse (!) the peewit fas and squeals.”

Our author is fond of refrains, and sometimes manages them artistically, and sometimes does not. This applies to his former books, but more especially to the volume before us; where, if there are some beautiful verses that fall upon the ear ever and anon like the cadence of sweet bells, there are instances, too abundant, of repetitions without rhyme or reason, which entirely mar the poems in which they occur. We conceive the true principle of a refrain is, that it be something: in itself both emphatic and musical, and which has a definite relation throughout, a mellowing or an arousing influence on the whole poem. Wherever they have been adjudged successful, from the very earliest instances down to Edgar Allen Poe’s “Raven,” this rule will be found to be preserved. It is so in the choruses of all our best songs, and the recurring strain which winds up each verse of many of our ballads. Witness “I love but you alone,” in the “Nut Browne Maid;” Campbell’s chaunt in “The Mariners of England;”—the “Toll Slowly,” in the “Rhyme of the Duchess May,” or the carol of the “May Queen” in Tennyson. All these are prominent in meaning, as well as in position; giving, in themselves, a summary of the piece in which they are set, or a



tone to its whole effect. I do not think that a similar plea can be put forward for such iterations as those in “Farewell,” or the verses well designated “Wind.” They indeed contain little else; the breezes signify nothing.—Besides, there is moderation in all things, and the mere number of “ wolds” and “ farewells” is appalling. There are others, which it is unnecessary to particularize, open to the same objection. “How’s my boy?” gives one the painful impression of being meant to be particularly fine;—painful, for we confess never to have heard it read without that αναριθμον γελασμα which is the fit corrective of whatever is so unnatural and constrained. It is just such a parody as Swift might have penned, in his sourest mood, to make mockery of the most holy affliction. We cannot attribute any such design to Mr. Dobell; but his insight is strangely at fault if he does not know that affection is the first, and not the last, to catch at the approach of evil tidings;—the foremost to realize the full import of calamity. In some instances there is a heaping up of words without adequate purpose, poems in fact which need not have been written. “The Sailor’s Return” is rather pointless, and the “Health to the Queen” a mere boisterous huzzah, unrelieved by any of that raciness which redeems from folly his lines about a fiddlestick. Two of the longest pieces, “Rain on the Roof” and a “Prayer of the Understanding,” in spite of a great deal that is excellent, remind us too much of the metaphysical reveries of Balder, and the “Gaberlunzie’s walk” contains nothing remarkably good to compensate for its mysticism. These blemishes are few, and such as we hope to see the author throw from him yet, if he is not one of those who cherish their defects, to the exclusion of all criticism except their own.—We turn to the agreeable task of indicating some of the more pleasing features of the volume.

In nothing has our recent poetry and romance made a greater advance, as compared with that of the last generation, than in the truer and better light in which it represents all the gentler features of humanity: most especially in the far higher position it assigns to woman and her influence. When we compare Tennyson with Dryden, in this light, or the “Men and Women” of Browning with those of Pope, we feel that we have abundant recompense for the vagueness and want of definition of which the followers of the old school so much complain. There is nothing more happily conspicuous in Mr. Dobell’s poetry than the delicacy with which he treats the female nature, the faith he seems to have in its omnipotence to purify and sustain. Hence the accurate sympathy with which he has here sung the joys and sorrows of many a matron and many a maid, as they lament the departed or welcome home the wanderer. There is a tone of true heroic feeling in the “Mother’s Lesson,” as she tells to her son how “his brave brither fell,”

• “Gran gran are a proud mither’s tears,
• And the gate that she gangs in her wae,”

for she has a comfort, amid them all, in thoughts of his glory and “Auld Lang Syne.”

“Tommy’s Dead” is among the most pathetic pictures of the desolation of bereavement we have seen. Here is a right use of a refrain; the knell comes in to disturb the simplest duties, and darken all things with the chill of the grave. The “Little Girl’s Song” is beautiful. How touching the address to her absent father!

• “Papa, papa, if I could but know!
• Do you think her voice was always so low?
• Did I always see what I seem to see,
• When I wake up at night and her pillow is wet?
• You used to say her hair it was gold—
• It looks like silver to me.
• But still she tells the same tale that she told,
• She sings the same song when I sit on her knee,



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• And the house goes on as it went long ago,
• 10When we lived together, all three.”

Something in the “Orphan’s Song” reminds us of certain verses in “Maud,” but it has a sweetness of its own. The image of the lonely child talking to her little bird as she dies, is brought very clearly before us in the mournful melody of those verses. One of the finest poems in the book, that certainly which displays the richest descriptive power, is the sad and oft told tale “He loves and rides away.” Listen to this cadence in the address of the deserted one to her infant.

• “Small and fair, choice and rare,
• Snowy pale with moonlight hair,
• My little one blossoms and springs!
• Like joy with woe singing to it,
• Like love with sorrow to woo it,
• So my witty one, so my pretty one sings!
• And I see the white hawthorn tree and the bright summer bird singing through it,
• And my heart is prouder than kings.”

The luxuriant image of a lady swimming, in another stanza, almost makes us think of Spenser’s bathing nymphs. “Lady Constance” and “Home Wounded” are masterpieces, in their way. Nowhere more has the poet shown his art than in this exaltation of a poor cripple soldier into an object almost of our envy, as a hero, with the labour of his life well done, left to wear out its evening in repose, amid the fragrance of the flowers. Here is a landscape, seen through the mist of love, in calm contentedness:

• “And she will trip like spring by my side,
• And be all the birds to my ear.
• And here all three we’ll sit in the sun,
• And see the Aprils one by one,
• Primrosed Aprils on and on,
• Till the floating prospect closes
• In golden glimmers that rise and rise,
• And perhaps are gleams of Paradise,
• And perhaps too far for mortal eyes,
• 10New springs of fresh primroses,
• Springs of earth’s primroses,
• Springs to be and springs for me,
• Of distant dim primroses.”

The repetition here never palls, it is the lingering of so beautiful a note. The opening lines of “A Shower in War time” are richly melodious, especially those about the angel in the cloud; it concludes, with a touch of philosophy not inapplicable at the present day.

• “Lov’st thou not Peace? Aye, moralist,
• Both peace and thee. Yet well I wist
• They who shut Janus did slay Christ.”

The “Young Man’s Song” and “An Evening Dream” contain much that is admirable; so also “A Hero’s Grave” and “Grass from the Battle field;” but is it an utter lack of all sense of the ludicrous, or what, that admits of lines like the following?

• “That ancient heaven of brass, so long unfurl’d,
• Falls with a crash of fame that fills the world.”

We are tempted to ejaculate with that classic critic Jeames Yellowplush,

• “Igsplane this, men and angels!”

Again what is meant by “haze in haze pervolving as in glad release,” or the whole passage about “the dry unjewelled cup” at the commencement of the same poem?—There is nothing that our author needs to bear more in mind than the necessity of plain speaking. It is hyper-criticism to insist on every figure and phrase being self-contained; still, all good general effect comes out of lines in which the ordinary mass of thinking readers can at least see some sort of meaning. But we had done with cavilling. “The German Legion” is a favourite of ours; it has the simple force of a true tale well told. We could wish to quote some of its latter verses, but perhaps the gem of the whole volume is the little ballad with which we must conclude those extracts. Let Mr. Dobell only write such songs as this, and England will not soon let either himself or his works pass from her affectionate memory.

• “Oh, happy, happy maid,
• In the year of war and death
• She wears no sorrow!
• By her face so young and fair,
• By the happy wreath
• That rules her happy hair,
• She might be a bride to-morrow!



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• She sits and sings within her moonlit bower,
• Her moonlit bower in rosy June;
• 10Yet ah, her bridal breath,
• Like fragrance from some sweet night-blowing flower,
• Moves from her moving lips in many a mournful tune!
• She sings no song of love’s despair,
• She sings no lover lowly laid,
• No fond peculiar grief
• Has ever touch’d or bud or leaf
• Of her unblighted spring.
• She sings because she needs must sing;
• She sings the sorrow of the air
• 20Whereof her voice is made.
• That night in Britain howsoe’er
• On any chord the fingers stray’d,
• They gave the notes of care.
• A dim, sad legend old
• Long since in some pale shade
• Of some far twilight told,
• She knows not when or where,
• She sings with trembling hand on trembling lute-strings laid;

• The murmur of the mourning ghost
• 30That keeps the shadowy kine;
• ‘Oh, Keith of Ravelston,
• The sorrows of thy line!’

• Ravelston, Ravelston,
• The merry path that leads
• Down the golden morning hill,
• And through the silver meads;

• Ravelston, Ravelston,
• The stile beneath the tree,
• The maid that kept her mother’s kine,
• 40The song that sang she!

• She sang her song, she kept her kine,
• She sat beneath the thorn
• When Andrew Keith of Ravelston
• Rode through the Monday morn.

• His huntsmen sing, his hawk-bells ring,
• His belted jewels shine!
• Oh, Keith of Ravelston,
• The sorrows of thy line.

• Year after year, where Andrew came,
• 50Comes evening down the glade,
• And still there sits a moonshine ghost
• Where sat the sunshine maid.

• Her misty hair is faint and fair,
• She keeps the shadowy kine;
• Oh, Keith of Ravelston,
• The sorrows of thy line!

• I lay my hand upon the stile,
• The stile is lone and cold,
• The burnie that goes babbling by
• 60Says nought that can be told.

• Yet, stranger! here, from year to year,
• She keeps her shadowy kine;
• Oh, Keith of Ravelston,
• The sorrows of thy line!

• Step out three steps, where Andrew stood,
• Why blanch thy cheeks for fear?
• The ancient stile is not alone,
• ’Tis not the burn I hear!

• She makes her immemorial moan,
• 70She keeps her shadowy kine;
• Oh, Keith of Ravelston,
• The sorrows of thy line!”

Though there is much true portraiture in this volume, it partakes largely of the general subjective tendency of modern imagination; i.e., that which directs itself to express the opinions, passions, and perplexities of the writer. Self-relinquishment has become rare in our lyrics: there is no trace of it in those pretended plays of which we have spoken; hence, in their perception of this decay of the Drama, many are apt to doubt of the possibility of its restoration. But it has not yet quite died from amongst us. There are links remaining to connect the last fifty years with more prolific periods. Coleridge and Elliot (in his “Bothwell”) have at least done something in this direction. To Savage Landor and the lamented Talfourd we owe several perfect reproductions of epochs long passed from our sight, with the actors in them. If the majesty of Byron’s plays is half artificial, Shelley’s is life-like enough in its breathing horror. Out of Shakespeare, what creation of English tragedy is there to match with Beatrice Cenci? We have still some writers who can conceive the deeds and thoughts of other men, and bring them before us, not as mere projections of themselves, but as external realities. “Edwin the Fair,” the “Saints’ Tragedy,” and “Gregory VII.” recal, with characteristic distinctness, many a half-forgotten feature of the Middle Ages. Ghent and Bruges, the quaint old Flemish cities, with their burgesses and heroes, civil strife and wars, arise, when evoked by the name of “Van Artevelde,” from the dimness of bygone centuries. Browning’s “Blot on the Scutcheon” and “Pippa Passes” alone would prevent us from despairing of some revival



of our Drama, and the literature of those last few years has given us no more hopeful sign of its future than this work of Mr. MacDonald’s. Many of our late poems may be called lyrical, although hardly fitted for a music-book. Those we have just been considering are chaunts rather than songs. There are others truly dramatic, which are by no means adapted for actual representation. The causes which regulate this are manifold: custom, national taste, and various circumstances connected with our theatre, which it might be worth while to discuss more fully. Suffice it meanwhile to admit that the prominence given to reflective emotion renders it impossible for such plays as the one before us ever to be so represented. A piece that will act well must have as much as possible outwardly manifest. Even the expression of private schemes, by means of numerous asides, has an unnatural air: when the thought becomes abstract, or dwells on themes we dare hardly evolve in human words, it can no longer be spoken before large audiences. But though we do not claim for “Within and Without” a place among the glories of the stage, we assert its right to be called a dramatic poem, because the characters are essentially real. They stand apart alike from the author and from one another, acting and reacting each on each, and fulfilling a plot, not the less intense because the struggle through which they pass is mainly a mental one. With less perhaps of that “Contemplative Imagination” which transfigures nature in its relation to the poet than some of his compeers, Mr. MacDonald is more richly gifted than they with an insight into the play of mind on mind. That penetrating faculty which, forestalling years of observation, in a moment, discerns the innermost spirit of the character it seeks to know, is one of the most distinctive marks of a real dramatist. Our author has also a large amount of that constructive power, by which the artist clusters details round one great conception, and elaborates a whole out of harmonious and converging parts. This alone can give effect to any such work, and it is here he is eminently successful where so many have failed. His expression is at once powerful and delicate, but we are more arrested by the thoughts themselves. There are many beauties in the book, but the book itself is more beautiful than any of them. We may read the first two or three pages with pencil in hand to mark passages for commendation or censure, but we presently let it fall, and are carried on by the breathless interest of the tale, till we are left at the end thankful for the good it has done us. It is not a poem to which in any respect justice can be done by extracts; nor is it any test of the value of a work of art, that a bit can be taken out of it and shown to advantage alone. A large class of critics remind us of the simpleton in Hierocles, who, wishing to sell a house, went about with a stone as a specimen; the most general ground plan had surely been more to the purpose. A great poet should be the builder of a temple, not a worker in mosaic. Were poetry to be valued by the number of quotable lines it affords, the essays of Alexander Pope would take rank with the “Paradise Lost,” or the “Inferno,” or many of Shakespeare’s tragedies.

Mr. MacDonald has divided his poem into five parts, having a very distant affinity to the five acts of the drop curtain, but each evolving some new phase, in the outward as in the spiritual history of his hero, and each prefaced by a sonnet, which is meant to serve as a sort of prelude or overture, giving as it were the moral of the successive chapters of life. There is a fine repose about them all; the first and third especially are wise and beautiful, but their connection with the main body of the work is hardly close enough.

The story is soon told. Julian, an Italian Count, loves Lilia, the daughter



of a rich merchant, near his castle: some misunderstanding thwarts their love, and, with his natural gloom deepened, he recoils for a while from earthly things to seek repose and a closer communion with the Eternal within the walls of a monastery. In vain! for he finds there, least of all, any sympathy for his daring thoughts, or fellowship in his searching reverence. He feels impelled again to seek a wider sphere for worship, in the strife of the world, and suddenly abandons the disappointed monks. During his absence the Count Nembroni has contrived to ruin Lilia’s father, and has laid a plot to become possessed of herself. Julian, arriving in time to frustrate this, inflicts summary justice on the aggressor. He discloses himself to Lilia, relieves her father, and induces her to accompany him to England as his wife. Five years afterwards they are represented as living in quiet retirement in London. His estates have become forfeit to the Church. She is obliged to assist their income by teaching, and in this way gets introduced to Lord Seaford. Meanwhile an estrangement has grown up between her and her husband—each believing that the other’s love has faded. She is misled into listening with too much complacence to the flatteries of the English nobleman, till at length, on a full declaration of his love, she is startled into a horror at herself, and flies at once from his presence and from her own home. Lord Seaford too leaves the country, and Julian, left alone with his child, mistakes the cause of his abandonment. Love at length conquers indignation, and he resolves to seek her through the world, but he must first guard his little Lily. Presently she dies, and, after a few months more wandering, the shades of night gather around him too. Meanwhile Lilia has resolved to return, and Seaford, who has heard of the terrible error, hastens to repair it; her letter and his message reach him in his last hours, but, in the midst of delirium, he hears and understands that she is innocent. There is here material for a drama, which might be wrought into very various forms. It is in his artistic and profound management of those elements that our author shows his high power. The character of Julian is throughout the most prominent one, his thoughts and inward struggle occupy so large a space of the volume that a severe critic might be disposed to complain of the preponderance of monologue. Still the monologue is very magnificent, nor are there many of those thoughts which in their clear majesty and reverence we would wish to lose, the less so because Julian’s soliloquy is no mere egotistic chaunt, but is elicited, in ample variety, by the vicissitudes of an eventful life. We can only trace a few of its most marked features. His picture, as given by one of his brother monks, is suggestive:

• “A tall dark man,
• Moody and silent, with a little stoop,
• As if his eyes did pull his shoulders down,
• And a strange look of mingled youth and age.”

Just such an one as would coil his thoughts too closely round his heart—a riddle hard to read; whose “Within and Without” would be apt to run far apart, only to find their reconcilement, at length, in the blue zenith where contradiction is solved and romance and reality meet. So, in this first part, he lives with the monks, but apart from them; their ways are not as his ways, nor is their religion, of symbols and formula, a thing to which he can square his dim majestic striving after communion with the Inscrutable.

• “Not having seen him yet,
• The light rests on me with a heaviness;
• All beauty seems to wear a doubtful look;
• A voice is in the wind I do not know;
• A meaning on the face of the high hills,
• Whose utterance I cannot comprehend.
• A something is behind them: that is God.”

This was not a confession that could well adapt itself to “our Holy Faith;”—it transcends the comprehension of the friendly monk who visits his cell.

“A good man,” says Julian,

• “But he has not waked,
• And seen the sphinx’s stony eye fixed on him.”

How many are there who pass through life unconscious of that “stony eye,” thinking they have solved the secrets of the universe because they have never approached to an understanding of their perplexity. The mass, ut semper, are wroth that he takes airs to himself and despises them—he is an Atheist at least, he hath a Devil surely.

• “Music tortures him:
• I saw him once, during the Gloria Patri,
• Rise slowly as in ecstacy of pain.”

His own account of this is rather different:

• “I bless you, sweet sounds, for your visiting,
• Stealing my soul with faint deliciousness.”

Visions of the past and future, beckonings of the outer world, come daily more and more to summon him away; he feels that cloisters “are not God’s nurseries for his children.”

• “It boots not staying here. Thirsting desire
• Wakens within me, like a new child heart,
• To be abroad on the mysterious Earth,
• Out with the moon in all the blowing winds.”

His friend Robert, with sore misgiving, connives at his escape; he goes “on into the dark,” companioned with his own glorious aspirations, that wondrous

• “Love of Knowledge and of Mystery,
• Striving for ever in the heart of Man,”

as he seeks the God, who retires before him from peak to peak of inaccessibility. It is pleasant, in a play of so serious a cast, to find a description so graphic as that given here of the old monks and their life. The picture of Stephen and his charitable delight in what he believes to be an unpardonable sin—“Well, one comfort is, it’s damnation and no reprieve”—shows that the author is not altogether devoid of humour. The good brothers are of the comfortable sort. The monastery is evidently one of those which, if we can trust Mr. Froude, would have stood but a poor chance in Henry the Eighth’s time.

Leaving that “house of foolishness,” Julian is shaken from his imperial dream by the cry of wrong; for he is to find that unfolding of the ideal he longs for, as we all must, by contact with the real. There is not much in the rescue from “Nembroni,” except the flash of native ferocity that it calls forth. The action is vivid, perhaps too much so. There is an abruptness, in some passages here, followed by over refinement in others: as Lilia’s dream of heaven, too serene for the hours following such intense agitation, which indicates a slight want of art; but this soon passes, and we are interested in the scruples she feels regarding the violation of his monkish vows. The appeal of events rather than argument settles the difficulty. Stephen has raised a hue-and-cry against them, and they escape together from a sudden pursuit. They row down a river with muffled oars, while Julian murmurs:

• “Dear wind, dear stream—dear stars,— dear heart of all,
• White angel lying in my little boat!
• Strange that my boyhood’s skill with sail and helm,
• Oft steering safely ’twixt the winding banks,
• Should make me rich with womanhood and life!”

And then the part ends with three verses, rivalling in their tuneful sweetness, the Bugle song. Here are two of them:

• “O wind of strife! to us a wedding wind!
• Oh cover me with kisses of her mouth.
• Blow thou our souls together, heart and mind;
• To narrowing northern lines, blow from the south.
• Out to the ocean, fleet and float,
• Blow, blow my little leaf-like boat.

• Thou hast been blowing many a drifting thing
• From circling cove down to the unshelter’d sea:
• Thou blowest to the sea my blue sail’s wing,
• 10Us to a new love-lit futurity.
• Out to the ocean, fleet and float,
• Blow, blow my little leaf-like boat.”

It is, however, in the succeeding portion of the volume that the art of the dramatist is most eminent. The conception on which the whole action is grounded is that of two natures, each with a greatness of its own, drawn towards each other by real sympathy, and yet estranged by a certain outward contrast. Hence doubt and jealousy, and its throng of cares; for the graceful ardent Lilia cannot understand the love hidden far in Julian’s deep heart, while he grows daily more mistrustful of her confidence, and retires ever farther, in his communings, alone. This is a subtle plot, which might have been mismanaged in a hundred ways. Mr. MacDonald has steered on the difficult course with the fidelity of the true poet’s instinct. Grant such a strange union of dispositions, and, with one exception to be noticed, there is nothing unnatural in the evolution of the issue. Julian is hard to convince from the first:

• “But do you really love me, Lilia?
• Why do you make me say it so often, Julian?”

Suspicion is the disease of self-consciousness, and again and again, with memories of the cloister, the old doubt comes up before him:

• “I am afraid the thought arises still,
• Within her heart that she is not my wife.”

Foundation enough for a world of unhappiness, even if the calamities and privation of their mutual lot did not point the sting:

• “It is not strange that thou art glad to go
• From this dull place, and be for some short hours
• As if thy girlhood were restored to thee;
• For thou art very young for a hard life,
• Such as a poor man’s wife must undergo.”

---

• Then I am older much than she.”

And again,

• “I have grown common to her.”

But he is wrong: Lilia thinks little of this, her complaint is only that his affection has become a duty; that he has grown cold as the glacier on the mountains he loves, that she is not enough for him:

• “He needs
• Some high entranced maiden, ever pure,
• And throng’d with burning thoughts of
• God and him.”

The lines in which, shortly after, she contrasts their natures, exhibit at once the apparent disparity between them, and two sorts of beauty for which the poem is distinguished.

• “Yet I have thoughts
• Fit to be women to his mighty men;
• And he would love them, did he lead them out.
• Ah! there they come, the visions of my land!
• The long sweep of a bay, white sands, and cliffs
• Purple above the blue waves at their feet.
• Down the full river comes a light blue sail;
• And down the near hill-side come country girls,
• Brown, rosy, with their loads of glowing fruits;
• 10Down to the sands come ladies, young, and clad
• For holiday; in whose hearts wonderment
• At manhood is the upmost, deepest thought;
• And to their sides come stately, youthful forms,
• Italy’s youth, with burning eyes and hearts—
• Triumphant Love is King of the bright day.
• Yet one heart, ’neath that little sail, would look
• With pity on their poor contentedness;
• For he sits at the helm, I at his feet.
• He sung a song, and I replied to him.
• 20His song was of the wind that blew us down
• From sheltering hills to the unshelter’d sea.
• Ah! little thought my heart that the wide sea,
• Where I should cry for comforting in vain,
• Was the expanse of his wide awful soul,
• To which that wind was helpless drifting me.
• I would he were less great and loved me more.”

Thus can two minds live on, looking daily into each other’s eyes for years, and yet, with a mysterious bar, more powerful than leagues of distance, compelling them to live unknown, while the inner and the outer life remain irreconcilable. So Julian broods



and suffers, with his majestic thoughts and his devout worship, whatever he reads or does, or meditates bringing his heart home to the same sorrow.

• “I would die for her;
• A little thing, but all a man can do.
• O my beloved, where the answering love?”

So Lilia, still more wearily, toils on, looking at his deepening gloom, and seeing less and less beyond it,

• “He grows more moody, still more self withdrawn;
• Were it not better that I went away,
• And left him with the child?”

“Lily” is one of the finest creations in the book. It augurs a pure and lofty mind to present a picture of childhood—so true, so simple, and so touching as Mr. MacDonald has given us here. To her Julian unbends from all his reserve, and she clings to him, in return, with the full confidence of infancy. From her first cry, as she starts from her little bed, “Oh take me, take me,” to the last, “Kiss me harder, father, I am better now,” she looks to him for shelter and guidance. The whole intercourse between them is full of beauties. Among these, Julian’s version of the parable, and her prattle about it, is especially natural. His song about the “little white Lily” is a rare treasure for any child. The ramble by the graveyard too reminds us of those questions so early asked, which it takes the searching of a lifetime to answer dimly.

• ’Tis where they lay them when the story’s done.“
• What, lay the boys and girls? Yes, dearest child,
• To keep them warm till it begin again.”

There is perhaps something of a pretty conceit in the notion of the church growing out of the tombs, but this other allegory has a sense which stretches far. Lily has got a book of verses in her hand, and cannot make out what it means. She peeps into it, holds it to her ear, rubs her hand over it, then puts her tongue on it—it is all of no use: but Julian, in his deserted loneliness, sees here an emblem of his own vain efforts to read the inscrutable, and cries bitterly,

• “Father, I am thy child. Forgive me this:
• Thy poetry is very hard to read.”

The author has shown considerable art in his management of the character of Lord Seaford. His words and thoughts—his songs, containing some of the most musical lines in the volume, and, above all, the energy of his remorse, at the end, indicate a nature in which luxury has fostered much of self-indulgence, without removing the germs of higher things. He appreciates Lilia’s spiritual as well as her actual beauty, and extends to all her tastes and interests the fulness of his sympathy. No wonder if, in the loneliness of her real and fancied exile, she finds a growing pleasure in his society, and, if in answer to his love, so different in the warmth of its expression from the outward coldness of her own poor home, signs of a new fondness begin to appear. She feels herself strangely confused, and does not know the heart-homage by which she is guarded till it is suddenly aroused, at the very crisis of danger, by one of those chances which sway the mind aright. It were out of place in a drama founded professedly on a perplexing contradiction to press the rules of ordinary probability, but we confess that the flight of Lilia, which so suddenly intervenes, is hardly explained by our previous knowledge. The lines quoted above, intimating some such thought, are evidently thrown in to facilitate the issue: but this is not enough. Revulsion, however strong, from her own momentary faithlessness, would hardly have induced her to abandon the two she loved most to certain perplexity, and the possibility of so dread a misunderstanding. After this the rest follows naturally, and our interest throughout the remainder of the sad tragedy is concentrated on the various phases of Julian’s anguish.



There is something terrible in the intensity of passion with which he first receives the announcement that his worship of purity had been a delusion. Storms of fierce wrath come over him in gusts now and then throughout, and he would find another use for the dagger with which he killed Nembroni, when the winds mockingly “howl Lilia in his ear.” But the beauty is to see how this gradually subsides, in the triumph of an all-reconciling love, and his longing, by day and night, is to search her out and bring her back to his forgiveness. The child left with him is chief among the influences which soften his anger and console his grief. Valiantly he goes on, fighting the good fight, till at last the great work is complete, in the triumph of humility and faith, and love. He is to blame, he says, he should have descended from his heights and walked in the valley with her long ago:

• “Now, now I see that often it was pride
• That drove me from her, would not let me speak;
• I could not rid me of myself—”

and when Lily too leaves him, weak and weary, and alone, his one thought is, “I’ll seek for her, my wife, until I die.” She meanwhile yearns to return, as the prodigal of old:

• “I think he will receive me: for he reads
• One chapter in St. Luke oftener than any.”

But when the late letter comes it is only that it may rest in the grave in which the mighty outworn spirit has taken up its rest. It is time for him to be gone, and he departs in the hope of a nobler journey than this earth’s one, though not before his face, in its last smile, has been transfigured by a knowledge of her stainlessness.

Such is a bare outline of a Drama which, for loftiness of thought and intensity of purpose, we have not often seen surpassed. Faint though this sketch be, we have left ourselves little opportunity for illustrating the minor features of the poem. Best viewed as a whole, it has eminent individual beauties, in no small number. Again and again, in Julian’s soliloquies, we meet with passages of pathos, sublimity, and passion which are enough in themselves to stamp the writer with the reputation of high genius. There are few pages in which something does not occur which any one might have been proud to write. Here are one or two of those gems taken nearly at random.

• Dumb Love.
• “On she came—and then
• I was bewilder’d. Something I remember
• Of thoughts that choked the passages of sound,
• Hurrying forth without their pilot-words;
• Of agony, as when a spirit seeks
• In vain to hold communion with a man;
• A hand that would and would not stay in mine;
• A gleaming of her garments far away.”

• Supplication.
• “Go thou into thy closet; shut thy door;
• And pray to Him in secret: He will hear.
• But think not thou by one wild bound to clear
• The infinite ascensions, more and more,
• Of starry stairs that must be climbed, before
• Thou comest to the Father’s likeness near.”

• The Old Law and the New.
• “Which is likest
• God’s voice? The one is gentle, loving, kind,
• Like Mary singing to her manger’d Child;
• The other like a self-restrained tempest;
• Like—ah, alas!—the trumpet on Mount Sinai”.

• Beauty Surviving.
• “Thy heart must have its autumn, its pale skies,
• Leading, mayhap, to winter’s cold dismay.
• Yet doubt not. Beauty doth not pass away;
• Her form departs not though her body dies.

---

• Do thou thy work—be willing to be old:
• Thy sorrow is the husk that doth unfold
• A gorgeous June, for which thou needst not strive.”

• Seaford Sings.
• “For now I have no soul; a sea
• Fills up my cavern’d brain,
• Heaving in silent waves to thee,
• The mistress of the main.

• O Angel! take my hand in thine;
• Unfold thy shining silvery wings;
• Spread them around thy fare and mine,
• Close curtain’d in their murmurings.

• O what is God to me? He sits apart
• 10Amidst the clear stars, passionless and cold;
• Divine! thou art enough to fill my heart;
• O fold me in thy heaven, sweet love, enfold”.

• Landscape Painting.
• “Shady woods and grass,
• With clear streams running ’twixt the sloping banks,
• And glimmering daylight in the cloven east;
• And sunbeams in the morning, building up
• A vapoury column, midst the near-by trees;
• And spokes of the sun-wheel, that, breaking through
• The split arch of the clouds, fall on the earth
• And travel round, as the wind blows the clouds;
• The distant meadows and the gloomy river
• 10Shine as the bright ray pencil sweepeth over.”

• Live Well.
• “Better to have the poet’s heart than brain,
• To feel than write; but better far than both
• To be on earth a poem of God’s making;
• To have one’s soul a leaf, on which God’s pen
• In various words, as of triumphant music,
• That mingleth joy and sorrow, setteth forth
• That out of darkness he hath brought the light.
• To such perchance the poet’s voice is given
• To tell the mighty tale to other worlds.

But the grandest passages are those in which the magnificence of thought and imagery runs on continuously. Let any one, who wishes to have a better guarantee for the inspiration of the writer than we have given him, read the lines which open with p. 71; Julian’s meditations in his counting-house, p. 92, where he finds a gladness in his daily toil; or his hopes for Lilia, p. 142. The parable which opens part iii. bears a moral that ought to be borne in mind. The poem in p. 109 is all full of melody. Nothing is more after our own heart than the description of the glories of the past. The pages from 97-100 glow with beauty; nor is there anywhere loftier imagination than in the dream of fair women, 147; but, as we are viewing the poem mainly in its dramatic aspect, we prefer to give the account of Julian’s visit to Lord Seaford, than which a finer subject was never presented to a painter.

• “Just as I cross’d the hall, I heard a voice—
• ‘The Countess Lamballa—is she here today?’
• And looking towards the door I caught a glimpse
• Of a tall figure, gaunt and stooping, drest
• In a blue shabby frock down to his knees,
• And on his left arm sat a little child.
• The porter gave short answer, with the door
• For period to the same; when, like a flash,
• It flew wide open, and the serving man
• 10Went reeling, staggering backwards to the stairs,
• ’Gainst which he fell, and then roll’d down and lay.
• In walk’d the visitor: but in the moment
• Just measured by the closing of the door,
• Heavens! what a change! He walk’d erect, as if
• Heading a column; with an eye and face
• As if a fountain-shaft of blood had shot
• Up suddenly within his wasted frame.
• The child sat on his arm quite still and pale
• But with a look of triumph in her eyes.
• 20Of me he took no notice; came right on;
• Look’d in each room that open’d from the hall;
• In every motion calm as frozen waves,
• Save, now and then, a movement, sudden, quick,
• Of his hand towards his side, unconsciously:
• ’Twas plain he had been used to carry arms.

• 3rd G. Did no one stop him?
• Bern. Stop him? I’d as soon
• Have faced a tiger with bare hands. ’Tis easy
• In passion to meet passion; but it is
• 30A daunting thing to look on, when the blood
• Is going its wonted pace through your own veins.
• Besides this man had something in his face,
• With its live eyes, close lips, nostrils distended,
• A self-reliance, and a self-command,
• That would go right up to its goal, in spite
• Of any no from any man. I would
• As soon have stopp’d a cannon-ball as him.



Column Break



• Over the porter, whom the fall had stunn’d,
• And up the stairs he went. I heard him go—
• 40Listening as it had been a ghost that walk’d
• With pallid spectre-child upon its arm—
• Along the corridors, and round the halls,
• Opening and shutting doors; until at last
• A sudden fear lest he should find the lady,
• And mischief should ensue, shot me up stairs.
• I met him half-way down, quiet as before;
• The fire had faded from his eyes; the child
• Held in her tiny hand a lady’s glove
• Of delicate primrose. When he reach’d the hall,
• 50He turn’d him to the porter, who had scarce
• Lifted him from the floor, and saying thus:
• ‘The Count Lamballa waited on Lord Seaford,’
• Turn’d him again, and strode into the street.”

We cannot leave this book without recording our personal admiration of the exalted and pure theology which pervades it. The whole is a grand sermon on the abundantly sustaining power of confidence in one Omnipotent. Listen once more to Julian’s summary of life:

• “This the first act
• Of one of God’s great dramas. Is it so?
• Sweep not dim dreamy thoughts across my soul
• Of something that I know and know not now?
• Of something differing from all this earth?

---

• Can this be death? for I am lifted up
• Large-eyed into the night. All I see now
• Is that which is, the living awful Truth.”

We have not said that this is a perfect poem; it is the high promise of one who has apparently not yet reached the fulness of his powers, from whom we hope for future dramas, as exalted and yet more real; with less of monologue and more of action. There is an over refinement in the images here and there, which sometimes approaches to a conceit; see page 1, for instance, or p. 130, about the rains and breezes. The stage directions are not well managed; adjectives are sometimes misapplied, as pearly and opal to the night; and there is a good deal said here and there which should be left to the reader’s imagination. These are small matters, which indeed we thought little of when raised above them by the interest of the book, and which we have fortunately little room to dwell on now. A more serious question remains as to the wisdom of the concluding scene, where the author has attempted to raise the dread curtain which bounds the vision of mortals, and imagined a glimpse into the realms of “a world not realized.” This is a daring effort, one no power could render adequate, and which can only be vindicated by some great gain. Of what passes on the arena of earth the insight of the poet may see more than other men, but as regards the unfathomable space beyond the guesses of us all are dim. There “we cannot order speech by reason of darkness,” as we utter our inarticulate hopes—each groping like a child:

• “An infant crying in the night,
• And with no language but a cry.”

Such dealing with the transcendent may indeed be defended by precedent of the two greatest names of two great nations. Dante, however, as yet stands alone in that dream which so grandly sums up the theology of those chaotic middle ages, and the latter part of the Faust, which will live to see the end of all its imitators, is no picture of actual life, but a succession of marvellous and magnificent phantasies. It is



the transition from the real to the ideal, from the seen to the unseen, about which we hesitate. It is a transition on which our greatest dramatist ne’er ventured, and in which we do not think Mr. MacDonald has been sufficiently successful to justify so far a flight. Ought not the Drama to have at least concluded with that vision of the guardian angel and Julian’s rapt seraphic hymn?

• “Come away! above the storm
• Ever shines the blue;
• Come away! beyond the form
• Ever lies the True.”

The more of the sustaining spirit of the Eternal we can realize, in the affairs of common life, the better. The more the dramatist can show how the men and women who daily walk the earth, live and move and have their being in the midst of immensity, the worthier is he of his high calling. But, be it as reverent as it may, the attempt to describe the inscrutable has ever an air of presumption whether in painter or poet. Then it is that words seem feeble, in the impotency to express the feeling of infinity in the hearts of the lowliest. These are “things too wonderful for us, which we know not,” to be limned neither by mortal pencil nor mortal pen, which eye hath not seen nor ear heard; for which we must labour on, and wait till the awful veil is rent in twain, and in the hour of revelation

• “We awake and remember, and understand.”

I suppose my birth was somewhat after the birth of Sir Percival of Galles, for I never saw my father, and my mother brought me up quaintly; not like a poor man’s son, though, indeed, we had little money, and lived in a lone place: it was on a bit of waste land near a river; moist, and without trees; on the drier parts of it folks had built cottages—see, I can count them on my fingers—six cottages, of which ours was one.

Likewise, there was a little chapel, with a yew tree and graves in the church-yard—graves—yes, a great many graves, more than in the yards of many Minsters I have seen, because people fought a battle once near us, and buried many bodies in deep pits, to the east of the chapel; but this was before I was born.

I have talked to old knights since who fought in that battle, and who told me that it was all about an old lady that they fought; indeed, this lady, who was a queen, was afterwards, by her own wish, buried in the aforesaid chapel in a most fair tomb; her image was of latoun gilt, and with a colour on it; her hands and face were of silver, and her hair, gilded and most curiously wrought, flowed down from her head over the marble.

It was a strange thing to see that gold and brass and marble inside that rough chapel which stood on the marshy common, near the river.

Now, every St. Peter’s day, when the sun was at its hottest, in the mid-summer noontide, my mother (though



at other times she only wore such clothes as the folk about us) would dress herself most richly, and shut the shutters against all the windows, and light great candles, and sit as though she were a queen, till the evening: sitting and working at a frame, and singing as she worked.

And what she worked at was two wings, wrought in gold, on a blue ground.

And as for what she sung, I could never understand it, though I know now it was not in Latin.

And she used to charge me straightly never to let any man into the house on St. Peter’s day; therefore, I and our dog, which was a great old bloodhound, always kept the door together.

But one St. Peter’s day, when I was nearly twenty, I sat in the house watching the door with the bloodhound, and I was sleepy, because of the shut-up heat and my mother’s singing, so I began to nod, and at last, though the dog often shook me by the hair to keep me awake, went fast asleep, and began to dream a foolish dream without hearing, as men sometimes do: for I thought that my mother and I were walking to mass through the snow on a Christmas day, but my mother carried a live goose in her hand, holding it by the neck, instead of her rosary, and that I went along by her side, not walking, but turning somersaults like a mountebank, my head never touching the ground; when we got to the chapel-door, the old priest met us, and said to my mother, “Why dame alive, your head is turned green! Ah! never mind, I will go and say mass, but don’t let little Mary there go,” and he pointed to the goose, and went.

Then mass begun, but in the midst of it, the priest said out loud, “Oh I forgot,” and turning round to us began to wag his grey head and white beard, throwing his head right back, and sinking his chin on his breast alternately; and when we saw him do this, we presently began also to knock our heads against the wall, keeping time with him and with each other, till the priest said, “Peter! it’s dragon-time now,” whereat the roof flew off, and a great yellow dragon came down on the chapel-floor with a flop, and danced about clumsily, wriggling his fat tail, and saying to a sort of tune, “O the Devil, the Devil, the Devil, O the Devil,” so I went up to him, and put my hand on his breast, meaning to slay him, and so awoke, and found myself standing up with my hand on the breast of an armed knight; the door lay flat on the ground, and under it lay Hector, our dog, whining and dying.

For eight hours I had been asleep; on awaking, the blood rushed up into my face, I heard my mother’s low mysterious song behind me, and knew not what harm might happen to her and me, if that knight’s coming made her cease in it; so I struck him with my left hand, where his face was bare under his mail-coif, and getting my sword in my right, drove its point under his hawberk, so that it came out behind, and he fell, turned over on his face, and died.

Then, because my mother still went on working and singing, I said no word, but let him lie there, and put the door up again, and found Hector dead.

I then sat down again and polished my sword with a piece of leather after I had wiped the blood from it; and in an hour my mother arose from her work, and raising me from where I was sitting, kissed my brow, saying,



“Well done, Lionel, you have slain your greatest foe, and now the people will know you for what you are before you die—Ah God! though not before I die.”

So I said, “Who is he, mother? he seems to be some Lord; am I a Lord then?”

“A King, if the people will but know it,” she said.

Then she knelt down by the dead body, turned it round again, so that it lay face uppermost, as before, then said:

“And so it has all come to this, has it? To think that you should run on my son’s sword-point at last, after all the wrong you have done me and mine; now must I work carefully, least when you are dead you should still do me harm, for that you are a King—Lionel!”

“Yea, Mother.”

“Come here and see; this is what I have wrought these many Peter’s days by day, and often other times by night.”

“It is a surcoat, Mother; for me?”

“Yea, but take a spade, and come into the wood.”

So we went, and my mother gazed about her for a while as if she were looking for something, but then suddenly went forward with her eyes on the ground, and she said to me:

“Is it not strange, that I who know the very place I am going to take you to, as well as our own garden, should have a sudden fear come over me that I should not find it after all; though for these nineteen years I have watched the trees change and change all about it—ah! here, stop now.”

We stopped before a great oak; a beech tree was behind us—she said, “Dig, Lionel, hereabouts.”

So I dug and for an hour found nothing but beech roots, while my mother seemed as if she were going mad, sometimes running about muttering to herself, sometimes stooping into the hole and howling, sometimes throwing herself on the grass and twisting her hands together above her head; she went once down the hill to a pool that had filled an old gravel pit, and came back dripping and with wild eyes; “I am too hot,” she said, “far too hot this St. Peter’s day.”

Clink just then from my spade against iron; my mother screamed, and I dug with all my might for another hour, and then beheld a chest of heavy wood bound with iron ready to be heaved out of the hole; “Now Lionel weigh it out—hard for your life!”

And with some trouble I got the chest out; she gave me a key, I unlocked the chest, and took out another wrapped in lead, which also I unlocked with a silver key that my mother gave me, and behold therein lay armour—mail for the whole body, made of very small rings wrought most wonderfully, for every ring was fashioned like a serpent, and though they were so small yet could you see their scales and their eyes, and of some even the forked tongue was on it, and lay on the rivet, and the rings were gilded here and there into patterns and flowers so that the gleam of it was most glorious.—And the mail coif was all gilded and had red and blue stones at the rivets; and the tilting helms (inside which the mail lay when I saw it first) was gilded also, and had flowers pricked out on it; and the chain of it was silver, and the crest was two gold wings. And there was a shield of blue set with red stones, which had two gold wings for a cognizance; and the hilt of the sword was gold, with angels wrought in green and blue all up it, and the eyes in their wings were of pearls and red stones, and the sheath was of silver with green flowers on it.

Now when I saw this armour and understood that my mother would have me put it on, and ride out without fear, leaving her alone, I cast myself down on the grass so that I might not see its beauty (for it made



me mad), and strove to think; but what thoughts soever came to me were only of the things that would be, glory in the midst of ladies, battle-joy among knights, honour from all kings and princes and people—these things.

But my mother wept softly above me, till I arose with a great shudder of delight and drew the edges of the hawberk over my cheek, I liked so to feel the rings slipping, slipping, till they fell off altogether; then I said:

“O Lord God that made the world, if I might only die in this armour!”

Then my mother helped me to put it on, and I felt strange and new in it, and yet I had neither lance nor horse.

So when we reached the cottage again she said: “See now, Lionel, you must take this knight’s horse and his lance, and ride away, or else the people will come here to kill another king; and when you are gone, you will never see me any more in life.”

I wept thereat, but she said:

“Nay, but see here,”

And taking the dead knight’s lance from among the garden lilies, she rent from it the pennon (which had a sword on a red ground for bearing), and cast it carelessly on the ground, then she bound about it a pennon with my bearing, gold wings on a blue ground; she bid me bear the Knight’s body, all armed as he was, to put on him his helm and lay him on the floor at her bed’s foot, also to break his sword and cast it on our hearth-stone; all which things I did.

Afterwards she put the surcoat on me, and then lying down in her gorgeous raiment on her bed, she spread her arms out in the form of a cross, shut her eyes, and said:

“Kiss me, Lionel, for I am tired.”

And after I had kissed her she died.

And I mounted my dead foe’s horse and rode away; neither did I ever know what wrong that was which he had done me, not while I was in the body at least.

And do not blame me for not burying my mother; I left her there because, though she did not say so to me, yet I knew the thoughts of her heart, and that the thing she had wished so earnestly for these years, and years, and years, had been but to lie dead with him lying dead close to her.

So I rode all that night for I could not stop, because of the thoughts that were in me, and, stopping at this place and that, in three days came to the city.

And there the King held his court with great pomp.

And so I went to the palace, and asked to see the King; whereupon they brought me into the great hall where he was with all his knights, and my heart swelled within me to think that I too was a King.