best. It all came to nothing: as
poetry it never began to be more than null. Mr. Hardy wrote a few
mournfully memorable lines on the seamy side of war. Mr. Owen Seaman
(who may pass for our contemporary Aristophanes) was smart and witty
at the expense of those whose philosophy goes a little deeper than
surface-polish. One man alone--Mr. Henry Newbolt--struck a note
which even his opponents had to respect. The rest exhibited plenty
of the turbulence of passion, but none of the gravity of thoughtful
emotion. I don't doubt they were, one and all, honest in their way.
But as poetry their utterances were negligible. As writers of real
poetry the Anti-Jingoes, and especially the Celts, held and still
hold the field.

I will not adduce poets of admitted eminence--Mr. Watson, for
instance, or Mr. Yeats--to prove my case. I am content to go to a
young poet who has his spurs to win, and will ask you to consider
this little poem, and especially its final stanza. He calls it--

A CHARGE

If thou hast squander'd years to grave a gem
Commissioned by thy absent Lord, and while
'Tis incomplete,
Others would bribe thy needy skill to them--
Dismiss them to the street!

Should'st thou at last discover Beauty's grove,
At last be panting on the fragrant verge,
But in the track,
Drunk with divine possession, thou meet Love--
Turn, at her bidding, back.

When round thy ship in tempest Hell appears,
And every spectre mutters up more dire
To snatch control
And loose to madness thy deep-kennell'd Fears,--
Then to the helm, O Soul!

Last, if upon the cold, green-mantling sea
Thou cling, alone with Truth, to the last spar,
Both castaway,
And one must perish--let it not be he
Whom thou art sworn to obey.

The author of these lines is a Mr. Herbert Trench, who (as I say) has
his spurs to win. Yet I defy you to read them without recognising a
note of high seriousness which is common to our great poets and
utterly foreign to our modern bards of empire. The man, you will
perceive, dares to talk quite boldly about the human soul. Now you
will search long in our Jingo bards for any recognition of the human
soul: the very word is unpopular. And as men of eminence write, so
lesser wits imitate. A while ago I picked up a popular magazine, and
happ