a story, but burning into one like the
touch of a corroding acid. These cruel and self-torturing lovers have no
illusions, and their 'tragic hints' are like a fine, pained mockery of
love itself, as they struggle open-eyed against the blindness of
passion. The poem laughs while it cries, with a double-mindedness more
constant than that of Heine; with, at times, an acuteness of sensation
carried to the point of agony at which Othello sweats words like these:

O thou weed,
Who art so lovely fair, and smell'st so sweet
That the sense aches at thee, would thou hadst ne'er been born!

Meredith has written nothing more like _Modern Love_, and for twenty
years after the publication of the volume containing it he published no
other volume of verse. In 1883 appeared _Poems and Lyrics of the Joy of
Earth_; in 1887 _Poems and Ballads of Tragic Life_; and, in 1888, _A
Reading of Earth_, to which _A Reading of Life_ is a sort of companion
volume. The main part of this work is a kind of nature-poetry unlike any
other nature-poetry; but there are several groups which must be
distinguished from it. One group contains _Cassandra_, from the volume
of 1862, _The Nuptials of Attila, The Song of Theodolinda_, from the
volume of 1887. There is something fierce, savage, convulsive, in the
passion which informs these poems; a note sounded in our days by no
other poet. The words rush rattling on one another, like the clashing of
spears or the ring of iron on iron in a day of old-world battle. The
lines are javelins, consonanted lines full of force and fury, as if sung
or played by a northern skald harping on a field of slain. There is
another group of romantic ballads, containing the early _Margaret's
Bridal Eve_, and the later _Arch-duchess Anne_ and _The Young
Princess_. There are also the humorous and pathetic studies in _Roadside
Philosophers_ and the like, in which, forty years ago, Meredith
anticipated, with the dignity of a poet, the vernacular studies of
others. And, finally, there is a section containing poems of impassioned
meditation, beginning with the lofty and sustained ode to _France,
December_ 1870, and ending with the volcanic volume of _Odes in
Contribution to the Song of French History_, published in 1900.

But it is in the poems of nature that Meredith is most consistent to an
attitude, most himself as he would have himself. There is in them an
almost pagan sense of the near