desires. Here all the impudences of
the brawling world reach you no more. You may count your hours, like
Endymion, by the strokes of the lone woodcutter, or by the progression
of the lights and shadows and the sun wheeling his wide circuit through
the naked heavens. Here shall you see no enemies but winter and rough
weather. And if a pang comes to you at all, it will be a pang of
healthful hunger. All the puling sorrows, all the carking repentance,
all this talk of duty that is no duty, in the great peace, in the pure
daylight of these woods, fall away from you like a garment. And if
perchance you come forth upon an eminence, where the wind blows upon you
large and fresh, and the pines knock their long stems together, like an
ungainly sort of puppets, and see far away over the plain a factory
chimney defined against the pale horizon--it is for you, as for the
staid and simple peasant when, with his plough, he upturns old arms and
harness from the furrow of the glebe. Ay, sure enough, there was a
battle there in the old times; and, sure enough, there is a world out
yonder where men strive together with a noise of oaths and weeping and
clamorous dispute. So much you apprehend by an athletic act of the
imagination. A faint far-off rumour as of Merovingian wars; a legend as
of some dead religion.

FOOTNOTE:

[42] "Deux poures varlez qui n'out nulz gages et qui gissoient la
nuit avec les chiens." See Champollion-Figeac's "Louis et Charles
d'Orleans," i. 63, and for my lord's English horn, _ibid._ 96.

CRITICISMS

CRITICISMS

I

LORD LYTTON'S "FABLES IN SONG"

It seems as if Lord Lytton, in this new book of his, had found the form
most natural to his talent. In some ways, indeed, it may be held
inferior to "Chronicles and Characters"; we look in vain for anything
like the terrible intensity of the night-scene in "Irene," or for any
such passages of massive and memorable writing as appeared, here and
there, in the earlier work, and made it not altogether unworthy of its
model, Hugo's "Legend of the Ages." But it becomes evident, on the most
hasty retrospect, that this earlier work was a step on the way towards
the later. It seems as if the author had been feeling about for his
definite medium, and was already, in the language of the child's game,
growing hot. There are many pieces in "Chronicles and Characters" that
might be detached from their original setting, and embodied, as they
stand,