SONGS WITHOUT WORDS.

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rhythm; and as the Germans have shown us that there may be beautiful songs without words, so do our better poets show us that there may be tunes without musical notation. Many of the finer odes of Horace possess this rhythm; they set themselves to music in the mind, and it is scarcely possible to refrain from singing them to music of their own suggestion; but by how much the more perfect such melody is, so much the more does it become needful to remove every uncongenial expression, every inharmonious tone. The music

which we have just cited may be improved by a little care.
We shall next exhibit another separate poem, taken from the
middle of the book, more solemn, and sad, and tender :—
"I stand beside thy lonely grave, my love.

The wet lands stretch below me like a bog;
Darkness comes showering down upon me fast;
The wind is whining like a houseless dog ;-
The cold, cold wind is whining round thy grave,
It comes up wet, and dripping from the fen;
The tawny twilight creeps into the dark,
Like a dun, angry lion to his den.

"There is a forlorn moaning in the air—

A sobbing round the spot where thou art sleeping;
There is a dull glare in the wintry sky,

As though the eye of heaven were red with weeping.
Sharp gusts of tears come raining from the clouds,
The ancient church looks desolate and wild;

There is a deep, cold shiver in the earth,

As though the great world hunger'd for her child.
"The very trees fling their gaunt arms on high,
Calling for Summer to come back again;
Earth cries that Heaven has quite deserted her,
Heaven answers but in showers of drizzling rain.
The rain comes plashing on my pallid face;

Night, like a witch, is squatting on the ground;
The storm is rising, and its howling wail

Goes baying round her, like a hungry hound.
"The clouds, like grim, black faces, come and go.
One tall tree stretches up against the sky;
It lets the rain through, like a trembling hand
Pressing thin fingers on a watery eye.
The moon came, but shrank back, like a young girl
Who has burst in upon funereal sadness;

One star came-Cleopatra-like, the Night

Swallow'd this one pearl in a fit of madness.
And here I stand, the weltering heaven above,
Beside thy lonely grave, my lost, my buried love!"

He

This is of a very high order; he who can write thus must ponder on the great gifts committed to his trust. To him nature is lifting up her veil, and he must meditate long and well on the wondrous beauties she is unfolding to him. Let him not be a rash hierophant, and yet let him not linger too long with an unstricken harp, lest truths pass away which ought to be photographed and preserved. We have said that Mr. Bigg is too familiar with his subject, and that the subject is a very high one: perhaps it is too high for so early an attempt, or, what may be more probably the case, the poet has not as yet acquired the "ars celare artem." wishes to teach us philosophy because he feels its beauty and its value, but he combines too much the professor with the poet. His characters talk, not dramatically but metaphysically, carrying on a disquisition by a dialogue in which each speaker does but advance the argument a step further. When that exquisite book, "The Ministry of the Beautiful," by Mr. Henry Slack, appeared, there was exactly the same objection made to its structure, but this was hyper-criticism ; for there the book was in prose, the dialogues were all separate and independent, and there was no purpose to be served by bringing out the characters of Lyulph and Edith. Here the book is one continuous poem, the object the same throughout and Mr. Bigg will, in due course of time, find that if he lets his interlocutors do nothing but talk, they can at least better explain his theories by having strongly marked individualities of their own. The following passage is beautiful, as a specimen of didactic poetry, but it would not only lose nothing but would actually gain by being dislocated from the poem, and set like a lovely picture in a separate frame:

"Ferdinand. Ay, Ferdinand, Alexis; come again
To take thee back unto thyself, my friend,
Ye will be strangers by this time I think!

"Alexis. Are we not always strangers to ourselves,

And strangers to each other? Evermore
We are insphered, like stars within ourselves,
And though we light each other in the dark,
There is no contact, no escape from self.
We are but torches gleaming here and there
Whose flames may never mingle. Here within
Is this self-conscious ME, and there without
Are others like me, who are yet unlike.

I am a world unto myself, and move
In my own orbit, whence I cannot stray!
And all without are distant stars to me,-

Between us wide-jaw'd darkness, hungry night!

NEO-PLATONISM.

"Ferd. I know not. There are holy laws which bind The planets of one family in one.

Systems and suns are link'd together thus,
And all to God. It may be that one pulse

Sent from his central heart, runs through the whole,
Threading the chasms with sympathies."

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There is in this passage more learning than would easily be suspected; there is a tone about it which leads us to think that the Neo Platonists are not unknown to the poet, and that he has found springing up in his own heart fountains like to those which overflowed in theirs. With one more quotation we shall close our remarks on Stanyan Bigg, and shall then glance briefly at the prospects of poetry among

us:

"Dost thou remember it-that olden time

When the woods whisper'd round us ere the Night
Had loosen'd her dark tresses o'er the world,
And a strange shadowy stillness, like a sleep,
Was settling on the Abbey's swarthy walls?

We had stroll'd from our friends, and stood beneath
The dark and broken arches, lichen-strewn.
We heard their talk far up the slumberous vale;
They seem'd a part of it, but not of us,

For we two were alone, and all the world
Seem'd dim and distant as some Siren-land
Moon-bath'd, and murmuring in an olden dream.
We were alone. I told thee of my love,

And question'd thee of thine. There was a hush
In which my being-present, past, to come-
Englobed itself into a moment's space,

6

And trembled like a dew-drop on the grass;
A hush so pregnant-such a hungry hush,
That I leapt startled at thy whisper'd 'Yes!'
Thy Yes,' my Flora, that one little word
That made me rich as any sun in heaven,
With a whole retinue of courtier worlds
Hanging upon his skirts to catch his smile.
It was as if a broken harp should thrill
Full-string'd and golden in a moment's space,
And give out music to the very winds.
That happy eve!-Dost thou remember it?

Flora. You lordly men live too much in your souls

While we poor maids live wholly in the heart.

6

You say My mind to me a kingdom is ;'-
We place the seat of empire otherwhere!
And thinkest thou a moment such as this,
In which a whole life's destiny was pack'd,--
A moment, said I?-Nay, the heart of being,

Destined to colour all my future life,—
A moment from the which my after years,
Like to blood-globules should derive their tone,-
That like the soul of nebulosities,

Trembled with fate, and starry after-life—
Could be forgotten in my waking hours?
Thy words to me were doom, I heard them all;
I answer'd thee, and gave thee love for love:
And thenceforth I was thine in heart and soul!"

The extracts we have made will suffice to justify us in placing this poet high among those who are hereafter to adorn our literary horizon. He has been perhaps less read and certainly less understood than the other three; his faults are the same as theirs, and his powers, as we apprehend, greater; but the rank he is by and bye to take among those “familiar in our mouths as household words" will mainly depend on himself.

He has evidently studied deeply both nature and books, but he must now study the accessaries of poetry—phraseology, and rhythm, and condensation, and dramatic art. Nor do we doubt that his maturer works will warrant the estimate which we have deliberately made of him.

For poetry, it is, as mercantile men say, looking up. With Tennyson as poet laureat, and such men as Arnold, and Owen Meredith, and Smith, and Dobell, and Massey, and Bigg, and Taylor, and Bailey, and many more brightening on and evermore, we need not fear that poetry will become extinct among us, or that its utterances will pass away without effect.

By

ART. V.-1. British Game Birds and Wild Fowl. BEVERLEY R. MORRIS, ESQ., A.B., &c. London: Groombridge and Sons. 1855.

2. Game Birds and Wild Fowl; their Friends and their Foes. By A. E. KNOX, M.A., &c. London: Van Voorst. 1850. 3. The Naturalists' Library.-Birds of Great Britain and Ireland, Vols. III. & IV; Game Birds and Gallinaceous Birds. By SIR WILLIAM JARDINE, Br., F.R.S.E., &c. London: Highley.

4. The Naturalist. Edited by B. R. MORRIS, ESQ. Nos. 1 to 51. London: Groombridge and Sons. 1851-1855.

WE have here a wide subject to discuss; one that will take our thoughts far away from the fireside and the study to

VARIETIES OF SCENERY.

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wander where the prickly furze puts forth its golden blossoms, and the blue campanula swings its delicate bells in the fresh autumnal gale. On the wide, wild moorland and the heathy hillside; through ferny woodland, and through thorny brake; by loch and glen, and brawling mountain stream; by placid lake, and along the shore, where the rude waves dash and break, and scatter their spray far up the beetling cliffs, tenanted by innumerable wild fowl, that fill the upper air with shrill and piercing cries, responsive to the clang and boom of the boisterous waves below. A scene like that described by Charlotte Smith, at Beachy Head, whose base is lashed by the ever-restless ocean :—

"Those inmate's of the chalky cliffs, that soar
The sides precipitous, with shrill harsh cry,
Their white wings glancing in the level beams,
The terns, and gulls, and tarrocks, seek their food,
And the rough hollows echo to the voice

Of the grey choughs and ever restless daws,

With clamours not unlike the chiding hounds."

Such are the scenes that we have, in fancy at least, to look upon; and such are the sounds that must for awhile fill our ears; not always, however, wild and dark and turbulant; not always harsh and discordant. Sometimes we shall press the velvet sward of the noble park, where the feathery fern waves free, and old ancestral trees cast shadows broad and deep far into the sea of golden sunshine; there the stillness will be only broken by the soft coo of the dove, the chatter of the jay, or the sudden whirr of the pheasant's wings, as it rises from the neighbouring thicket, and flies across the glade, in all the glittering splendour of its gold and russet plumes. Sometimes we shall linger by the flowery dingle, or the hedgerow bank, and see the speckled partridge lead her young brood forth into the clover patch, or corn-field, to hunt amid the green stalks for beetles and wire-worms, and such like " delicacies of the season.” Sometimes amid the stillness and solitude of its mountain home, we shall mark the black-cock spread its glossy wings, or the red grouse bask amid the heather, as yet unscared by dog and gun; or, (rare sight!) perchance, catch a glimpse of that monarch of game birds, the capercailzie, in his now almost deserted home, amid the pine woods of Scotland, and,

"Yon wild mossy mountains sae lofty and wide,

That nurse in their bosom the youth o' the Clyde,

Where the grouse lead their coveys through the heather to feed,

And the shepherd tents his flock as he pipes on his reed."