Like the title "The Bird," the substance is general, and is characteristic of nothing in particular as is most of the conventional nature description of the day.

Witness, however, the realism of the dove that "murmurs soft, then with a rolling Note, Extends his crop, and fills his am'rous Throate"; of the lark "that sings and flies, When near the Earth, contracts her narrow Throate and warbles on the Ground"; of the baby owls, "with Vultur's Becks, and Shoulders higher than their Necks!"

In her whole poem on the nightingale, which seems to be an attempt to parallel the attacks upon him of her contemporaries, she has no lines equal in music to the two chance verses in her "Aminta of Tasso":

For this, the Nightingale displays her Throate,
And Love, Love, Love, is all her Ev'ning Note.

Eastwell

For trees, Lady Winchelsea had an artist's eye. Park, the estate upon which she lived for many years, fostered her discrimination for the rare and beautiful in trees. Cowper's "Yardly Oak" may bave been the first long poem on a special tree, but Lady Winchelsea, years before, had produced a short one of considerable distinction. Any lover of trees will commend the dramatic end which she has conceived as worthy of the tree; that nature, not man, should determine such a death, and "should proclaim the fall."

The collection of Edward Dowden contains part of a long poem written as a remonstrance from Ardelia to Frances, Countess of Hertford, who had imposed upon Ensden, Poet-Laureate, the task of writing upon a wood with mention of no tree except aspen, and no flower except king-cup. Ardelia defends the trees in formal, conventional lines, until she suddenly sees the grove by moonlight:

Doubtful the moon each varying object brings,
Whence goblin stories rise, and fairy rings,
Misshapen bushes look like midnight elves,

And scarce we know our shadows from ourselves.

The imaginative quality of such a description has a Shakespearean flavor.

Though the qualities of different trees are frequently taken to symbolize their human prototypes, now and then a piece of

purely descriptive writing shows that Lady Winchelsea saw the trees with the clear eyes of affection:

A Grove of Mirtles compassed it about,
Which gave no more admittance to the Sun
Than served to chear the new appearing Flowers
And tell the Birds, itt was their time to sing.
A cristal Spring stole through the tufted grasse,
Hasting to reach a Fountain, which itt fed,

And murmer'd still, when 'ere itt found a Stop.

That the sea is not mentioned more frequently in the poems of Lady Winchelsea is not due, probably, to any conventional eighteenth-century dislike of it. On the contrary, the evidence thus far points toward the assumption that Lady Winchelsea would have written about almost anything which moved her. So much of her life was spent at Eastwell Park and in the heart of the country away from the ocean that she could have had little opportunity to become acquainted with it. That it had not entirely escaped her appreciation, however, is shown in the exquisite description of its calm :

For smooth it lay, as if one single Wave

Made all the Sea, nor Winds that Sea could heave.

Coleridge might have borrowed those lines for his "Ancient Mariner."

The light touch of Cowper's treatment of small animals would probably have made verse quite unpublishable a half century earlier. Lady Winchelsea's recognition of the limitations of her public may have been the reason that her gay little animal verses remain among the unpublished manuscripts. Edward Dowden prints a portion of a dialogue between a Dutch mastiff and his counsellor, the elder "Pugg." Part of it discusses the charms of a new dog, Yanica, who is a source of anxiety to them:

Tho' Yanica is small and jetty,

Sleek as a mole and wondrous pretty,
Her beauty in its youthful splendour,
Such embonpoint, so soft, so tender,
Minion ev'n when she's most untoward,
Genteelly coy and chastely froward,
A bitch that any heart could soften,
And no wise dog would see her often,
Yet had you heard my dame commend her,
You would have wished a rope might end her.

Her sly attack on the feminine fear of a mouse anticipates Cowper's tale of the destruction of the viper:

These ladies, dreaming of no ill,
Who fragrant tea did drink and fill,
And but for laughing had sat still,

Were aim'd at in a treacherous sort,
Low as their feet-as some report—
And petticoats, you know, are short.

The solemn foe was clothed in black,
To hide him in the sly attack,
And gone too far e'er to draw back.

When Temple, who th' assailant spies,
(For who can 'scape from Temple's eyes?)
Into a chair for safety flies.

Hatton, who stirr'd not from her place,
Confest her terror by the grace

Of the vermillion in her face.

The mouse finally perishes for his crime, we are assured by Dowden, and tea again begins to flow. One would like to know how much of this spontaneous verse is lost in unpublished manuscripts.

Lady Winchelsea's gentle radicalism succeeded in procuring for her a freedom which few poets and no women of the period seem to have compassed. She wrote verses of warm admiration to her own sex at a time when women were permitted but one interest, man; she upheld the attractions of the country before even the earliest Romanticist had separated himself from the Strand; she took upon herself the unprecedented right to look at details, and furthermore to record them; she even had a humorous fling now and then.

Her "Ballad to Mrs. Catherine Fleming in London from Malshanger Farm in Hampshire" is seasoned by a dash of each of these characteristics. It has, moreover, some of the haunting quality of Alfred Noyes in one of his few good poems, "The Barrel-Organ":

From me, who whilom sung the town,

This second ballad comes,

To let you know we are got down

From hurry, smoke, and drums,

And every visititor that rowls

In restless coach from Mall to Paul's,

With a fa-la-la-la-la-la.

For jarring sounds in London streets,
Which still are passing by;

Where 'Cowcumbers!' with 'Sand, ho!' meets,

And for loud mastery vie.

The driver whistling to his team

Here wakes us from some rural dream,

With a fa-la-, etc.

From rising hills, thro' distant views,
We see the sun decline;

Whilst everywhere the eye pursues
The grazing flock and kine;

Which home at night the farmer brings,

And not the post's but sheep's bell rings.
With a fa-la., etc.

Beneath our feet the partridge springs

As to the woods we go,

Where birds scarce stretch their painted wings,

So little fear they show ;

But when our outspread hoops they spy,

They look, when like them we should fly,

With a fa-la-la-la-la-la.

The Ballad in its music and its theme, the spontaneous animal verses, the poems to women, and the "Nocturnal Reverie" its sense-interpretions, are all complete poems, typical of the modernist tendencies of Lady Winchelsea. Much of her work deserves obscurity, embodying as it does the conventionality, the dullness, the falsity of the poetic literature of the time. But the gleams of originality, the reach after beauty, the flashes of truth, persistently illuminate her work and make visible through the centuries the solitary figure of the woman poet who dared to attempt the creation of reality.

The Carnegie Foundation, New York.

MABEL L. ROBINSON.

LOWELL AS A POET OF NATURE

So circumspect a critic as Mr. Brownell has recently said that Lowell's nature poetry is probably the best that America has contributed. Perhaps it is; but many devotees of Emerson, or Whittier, or Whitman, would answer in the negative, and even if Thoreau's verse is halt, lame, and blind, his prose in Walden and the Journal contains poetry of a high and durable order. In artistic form Lowell's verse unquestionably ranks first, yet if there is anything that Lowell was not, it is the artist: not one of his poems in which nature dominates has the ring and swing of the perfect lyric. In this matter of comparison, the artistic element seems to me therefore irrelevant. It will be necessary, in the romantic way, to concentrate on the "message," on the effectiveness of the emotion which nature rouses in the poet. From this point of view, however, nothing final can as yet be said. The modern nature cult, as Lowell himself observed, is largely the last refinement of a refined age-primitivism, especially, is a token of over-cultivation-and the age is thus, in a measure, discredited in any endeavor it may make to estimate the real importance of its nature poets. But looking at the matter as clearly as possible, we are, I think, drawn to the conclusion that Emerson and Thoreau and Whitman will ever be poets for the few and Lowell and Whittier poets for the many; and further, if "communion with nature," a religious love of nature, be the characteristic attitude in years to come, the first three are most likely to dominate, whereas if a Chaucerian love of nature or a semi-classical view of nature (in which man is of central interest) be the attitude of the future, the last two will probably dominate. How far the present reaction against romanticism, which has as yet barely touched several of the arts, will carry us, no one can say; but in any case, Lowell, thanks to his avoidance of the eccentric and the tangential, seems less open to attack than Thoreau and other mystics and pseudo-mystics of America and England.

Whatever may be Lowell's seems fairly safe in any age.

degree of excellence, in kind he His devotion to nature was not