the north, of the far north,-the north of the old sagas and runes. You must imagine him as a Scandinavian without Scandinavian hardness, but with the great capacity of that race for idealism and tenderness extraordinarily developed within him.

What I have just said I do not think you will be able to understand fully, because without having had much experience of European differences of character, race-character, you can scarcely comprehend in what the Scandinavian peoples differ from other western peoples. Yet there is one thing which you will certainly be able to understand,that the freshness of youth remains longer with the man or woman of the north than with the man or woman of the south. At the age of forty a Scandinavian woman may still be very beautiful; at the age of fifty a man may still be considered young. At nineteen or twenty the youth is still a boy; elsewhere he would be a man. And this physical freshness is accompanied by a great freshness also of mind and heart. All this helps to explain a something in northern character that is quite different even from English or German character, and incomparably different from French or Italian character.

Now consider the feelings of boyhood and the thoughts of boyhood as compared with those of mature experience. How beautiful they are! In boyhood we believe everything good about ourselves and about the world. We also believe in other worlds than the present. We see everywhere about us the beautiful, and the future seems full of golden promise. Best of all, in boyhood we do not know our weaknesses, and we believe ourselves able to do thousands of things which we could never really do; we are full of happy confidence. This condition encourages us to dream day-dreams-dreams of glory and power and love and fame, and ever so much that as men we can not dare to think about at all. This happiness and self-confidence and love of dreaming that belongs to youth everywhere,

To literature Berkeley's service was chiefly that of aiding the cultivation of an exquisite taste. He wrote English of great simplicity and clearness, through his ambition to imitate as far as possible the beautiful strength and lucidity of Plato; and he brought into English something very much resembling the fine quality of the Greek philosopher.

CHAPTER IX

POE'S VERSE

THERE is very little of Poe's verse; yet he has been called, by the greatest English critics, the only real American poet. There is very little of it; yet scarcely a single poet of the Victorian age has altogether escaped its influence. We can find traces of Poe in almost every one of the greater poets of our time, as well as in the host of minor poets.

One of the reasons for this influence was certainly that wonderful sense of the values of words, of their particular colours and sounds, of their physiognomy, so to speak, which Poe shared with the greatest masters of language that ever lived. His instinct in this direction led him especially toward the strange, the unfamiliar, the startling; and he was able to produce effects of a totally unexpected kind. Even when he shows the inspiration of some older poet, he invariably improves upon what he takes. Perhaps you remember Byron's famous lines about passion:

The cold in clime are cold in blood;

Their passion scarce deserves the name;
But mine was like the raging flood

That boils in Ætna's breast of flame.

This comparison of a lover's blood to lava is so strong that one might well doubt whether the extravagance of speech in describing passion could be pushed any further. Perhaps Poe was the only poet of the age who could have pushed it further, and who did. Undoubtedly he was inspired by Byron's lines; see how he transforms and enlarges the whole fancy

These were days when my heart was volcanic

As the scoriac rivers that roll,

As the lavas that restlessly roll

Their sulphurous currents down Yaanek
In the ultimate climes of the pole,

That groan as they roll down Mount Yaanek,
In the realms of the boreal pole.

This strikes us at once as a much more extravagant utterance than Byron's, but it does not shock; on the contrary it fascinates us by its strangeness and its grotesque force. Moreover, it explains itself at once by reason of this fantastic strangeness. We know that the utterance is not that of a perfectly sane man; this is madness. The poem is intentionally mad; it is a description of nightmare horrorhorror and fear of the unseen; and the speaker, being wild, uses only wild similes and exaggerations. Yet there is a grandeur in these images, as there often is in great madness-the madness of genius. Now Poe alone had the skill to do these things, to make the extravagant and the extravagantly terrible a source of art and pleasure.

But it was not only the novelty of his fancy and the queer power of his language that made him so influential. He introduced new ideas of melody into verse, especially by what has been called the "repetend." This word, formerly used only in mathematics, has now the signification in literature of the artistic repetition of lines or phrases, partly with a view to the intensification of some new fancy. Yet the repetend is not exactly repetition; it is repetition with modification. The line is repeated almost in its first form, but not quite so, and the slight change deepens the effect. You have good examples of repetend in the verse above quoted; lines two and three form one example of repetend; and lines five and seven form another repetend; while lines four and six constitute yet another form of repetend. I did not quote you a whole stanza. The entire stanza contains another repetend, which would make four repetends in ten lines. At some future time I must speak to you about another form of this art, very ancient, for it is a general characteristic of the great Finnish epic, the Kale

would now seem to be. Yet again, his own original work in these directions is not a fourth part of his work in the same direction as an editor. You will find in your library a collection of thirty-one volumes, entitled "Poems of Places" -examples of poetry written about all the famous places in all parts of the world, from England to Japan, from northern Asia to southern Australia. There is no other work of this kind in the English language, and its value can scarcely be too highly spoken of. Almost all the poets of Besides, you must recol

the world are represented there. lect that Longfellow made perhaps the best metrical translation of Dante that has ever been made in modern times. Surely these productions ought to compel recognition of his importance as an educator in the best sense of the word. And now, turning back to the subject of the ghostly element in his short poems, let us consider together examples of this quality here and there. It infuses the entire mass of his shorter work; yet it has not been at all properly noticed by critics.

I began with one poem about church bells; here is another. It happens to be the last thing he wrote before he died. First I must tell you that the place mentioned is a little town upon the Coast of Mexico. There used to be many monks there, but with the decay of Spanish power, the little town also decayed, and a republican government drove the priests and the monks away, and nothing was left of their work but an old ruined church, which has now almost fallen to pieces. The bells of the church tower, however, remained swinging there, and sometimes when great winds were blowing, the bells would sound in a melancholy way over the sea, out of the dead Spanish town. Longfellow therefore wrote this poem.

What say the bells of San Blas
To the ships that southward pass

From the harbour of Mazatlan ?
To them it is nothing more