The longer we stay

The longer we may;

Southey calls this one of the play

his pieces. We are glad to have a poet's testimony to its merits. It is a remarkable example of Cowper's special power of picturesquely reproducing a scene, incident, or situation; and by touches minutely true, playing with the trivialities of life as an exercise of his apt and choice resources of language. The editors have probably thought the subject too trivial, for it has been "overlooked" in every edition of his poems that we know of. There is a poem of Coleridge's which comes under our class, having been clearly written with friends only in view; but as it is inserted in his works, we will only indicate it by a few lines. It is that Ode to the Rain, composed in bed on the morning appointed for the departure of a very worthy but not very pleasant visitor, whom it was feared the rain might detain :

"But only now, for this one day, Do go, dear Rain, do go away!

Of all the intellectual gifts bestowed on man, the most intoxicating is readiness the power of calling all the resources of the mind into simultaneous action at a moment's notice. Nothing strikes the unready as so miraculous as this promptitude in others; nothing impresses him with so dull and envious a sense of contrast in his own person. To want readiness is to be laid on the shelf, to creep where others fly, to fall into permanent discouragement. To be ready is to have the mind's intellectual property put out at fifty or a hundred per cent; to be unready at the moment of trial, is to be dimly conscious of faculties tied up somewhere in a napkin. What an engine-we are speaking of "the commerce of mankind" is a memory ready with its stores at the first question, words that come at your call, thoughts that follow in unbroken sequence, reason quick at retort! The thoughts we may feel not above our level; the words we could arrange in as harmonious order; the memory, only give it time, does not fail us; the repartee is all the occasion called for, if only it had not suggested itself too late, thus changing its nature from a triumph into a regret. It is such comparisons, the painful recollection of panic and disaster,

the speech that would not be spoken, the reply that dissolved into incoherence, the action that belied our intention, or, it may be, experience in a humbler field, that gives to readiness such a charm and value. The ready man does seem such a very clever fellow. The poet's readiness does not avail him for such practical uses, and does not contribute to his fame or success at all in the same degree. It is the result -the thought, the wit, the sense -not the speed of performance, which determines the worth of his efforts. But we delight in an extempore effusion because of the prestige of readiness called into play in busy life; at least this adds to the pleasure. The poet's best verses are the greatest, least imitable, wonder about him; but we are apt to be most surprised when he shows his powers under immediate command and good lines, struck off at a heat, do give us a vivid insight into the vivacity and energy of the poetical temperament, prompt in its action, ready at a call, and gaily willing to display its mechanical facilities. There is a specimen of Dryden's fluency in extempore verse, communicated and authenticated by Malone, which shows that foresight and composite action which a strong imagination seems to possess, uttering what it has prepared, and composing what is to follow, at one and the same timea habit or faculty observed in Sir Walter Scott by his amanuenses. This double action must belong to all rapid complex expression; but the difficulty is enhanced and the feat magnified in proportion when rhythm and rhyme are added to the other requirements.

"Conversation one day after dinner at Mrs Creed's running upon the origin of names, Mr Dryden bowed to the good old lady and spoke extempore the following verses

yours;

Till faith hereafter is in vision drown'd, And practice is with endless glory crown'd."

Dr Johnson, readiness itself in his conversation, has left some remarkable examples of the extemporising power. Mrs Thrale relates that she went into his room at Streatham on her birthday and complained, "Nobody sends me verses now, because I am five-and-thirty years old; and Stella was fed with them till forty-six, I remember." "My having just recovered from illness will account for the manner in which he burst out suddenly; for so he did without the least previous hesitation whatsoever, and without having entertained the smallest intention towards it half a minute before :

"Oft in danger, yet alive,

We are come to thirty-five;
Long may better years arrive,
Better years than thirty-five.
Could philosophers contrive,
Life to stop at thirty-five,

Time his hours should never drive
O'er the bounds of thirty-five.
High to soar, and deep to dive,
Nature gives at thirty-five.
Ladies, stock and tend your hive,
Trifle not at thirty-five;

For howe'er we boast and thrive,
Life declines from thirty-five.
He that ever hopes to thrive
Must begin by thirty-five:
And all who wisely wish to wive,
Must look on Thrale at thirty-five."

"And now," said he, as I was writing them down, "you may see what it is to come for poetry to a dictionarymaker; you may observe that the rhymes run in alphabetical order exactly, and so they do."

His extempore parodies are by no means feats like this, which is really a bundle of valuable maxims; but how easily flow the lines to Miss Reynolds, in 'imitation of the 'Penny Ballads,' and how well the rhythm is caught!

"I therefore pray thee, Renny dear,
That thou wilt give to me,
With cream and sugar softened well,
Another dish of tea.

Nor fear that I, my gentle maid,
Shall long detain the cup,
When once unto the bottom I
Have drunk the liquor up.
Yet hear, alas! this mournful truth,
Nor hear it with a frown,
Thou canst not make the tea so fast,
As I can drink it down."

Swift had an "odd humour" of

extemporising rhymed proverbs, which he brought out with such apt readiness as to puzzle collectors of old saws. Thus, a friend showing off his garden to a party of visitors without inviting them to eat any of the fine fruit before them, Swift observed, "It was a saying of my dear grandmother's

66

Always pull a peach,

When it is within your reach,"

and helped himself accordingly, an example which, under such revered sanction, the rest of the party were not slow to follow.

The value of all specimens lies a good deal in the assurance of their authenticity as unprepared efforts, sudden plays of humour or ingenuity. The following professes also to be extempore; but there must have been finishing touches, - it surely passes human power to have been hit off in one sustained unbroken flow. That it answers our leading requirement as poet's play work, there can be no doubt. Whitbread, it seems, had perpetrated the unpardonable sin against taste and parliamentary usage, of introducing personal and family matters into his speech on a great

of letters and private recollections. In only one case have we referred to the poet's "poems" for the specimen in point; though our extract may, in one or two instances, have been removed from its original standing to a niche in what are emphatically called an author's works.

It is obvious, on this and other grounds, that our poets at play can include no living brother within their circle. Poets must first be

known and valued by their works. They must have done great things before we care for trifles from their hands. But this knowledge once acquired, and an estimate formed, a further intimacy may be promoted by some acquaintance with performances which do not rank among their works.

It would be very unjust to measure them by such specimens as we have strung together; but having established their reputation with us, trivialities, like many of these, if they do not contribute to their fame, yet suggest versatility, and in most cases add an engaging touch of homely nature to a great name. They are all examples, as we began by saying, of that essential element of the poet's nature when in working effective order-exceptional life and spirits. Nobody writes verse for his own pleasure, or even relief, without the barometer of his spirits being on the rise.

They are tokens

of that abiding youthfulness which never leaves him while he can write

a living line. The poet, we need not say, is for ever sighing over the youth that is past and gone, not taking note of the youth that remains to him, altogether independent of years. But, in fact, he is a boy all his life, capable of finding amusement in matters which the plodding man of the world considers puerile, and so conferring on his readers and lovers some share of his own spring, some taste of the freshness which helps to keep the world alive.

1

VISITORS to the Vienna Exhibition were grievously disappointed at one part of the promised show. They had been told that all the nations and peoples of the remote orient would come crowding in the wake of their miscellaneous exhibits to the palace of industry on the semi-oriental Danube. They came in faith and hope, to see few signs of anything of the kind. There were no flowing draperies in silk or flowered calico, no jewelled turbans or high-crowned caps of fur. If there were any Pagan visitors from the Tartar steppes, they were so completely disguised en Chrétien that there was no detecting them. If there were gentlemen from the Caucasus or the Persian frontier, they had dismantled themselves of their ambulant armories, and left their cartridge-quilted vests at home. The Anglicised Hindoo was conspicuous by his absence. We believe there was but a single Chinaman, and he was on duty in the department of the Flowery Land; nay, even the Osmanli from the neighbouring Bosphorus had not been stirred sufficiently from his habitual apathy to trouble himself to undertake the easy voyage by rail and steamboat. En revanche, there was one strange type of nationality you met at every turn-small, slight-made men, with olive complexions and black twinkling eyes slit almond-fashion. But on their way to Vienna they had probably passed by Paris, and were dressed in such garments as are to be procured at the Belle Jardinière or the Bon Diable, with tall chimney-pot hats that came well down upon their foreheads. They had taken wonderfully kindly to these new clothes of theirs, and yet there was

something about them that told you they were masquerading cleverly. On the first glance you were conscious of an impression you had seen them somewhere before, and then it gradually dawned on you that it was on porcelain vases and lacquered cabinets you had met them. For these were the Japanese, the sprightly children of "the Land of the Rising Sun;" and it was not only in the ease with which they had slipped into their European clothes that they showed their happy faculties of adaptation. They were little versed as yet in foreign tongues; they knew next to nothing of German gutturals. But there they were, working their way about everywhere, giving the freest play to their inquiring minds, and dispensing for the most part with interpreter or cicerone. They hopped on behind the crowded tramway cars with an utter absence of the dignity we regard as the birthright of oriental blood; they submitted to be jostled and trodden upon with as little sign of temper or prejudice as the good-humoured Viennese themselves; they bartered their base Austrian coin for conductors' tickets as if they had been accustomed to street railways from their boyhood. You saw them everywhere, because they had been sent so far upon their travels at the Government expense, to act on the maxim of the sage Bacon. Travel with them was indeed a part of education, and they were studying men as much as things. The shrewd interest shown in their sharp eyes seemed never to flag for a moment; the flesh might sometimes be weary, but the spirit was always willing. If they had shipped any prejudices with them in Japan, they