Heaven's fire is around thee, to blast and to burn;
Return to thy dwelling! all lonely return!

For the blackness of ashes shall mark where it stood,
And a wild mother scream o'er her famishing brood.13

At all events, so far as I have for the present surveyed an illustrious life's work, the sum is disappointing, as judged by modern standards. The bulk of Campbell's verse has fallen upon evil days since its publication, when each successive piece was hailed with enthusiasm. He founded no school, and left no disciples interested in the maintenance of his fame. His poems themselves have little of the unity of spirit which might have rendered them mutually supporting and enlightening. While I have directed attention to qualities which ensure literary benevolence, the prospect of that, and nothing more, would have been mortifying indeed to a once popular idol. But I have left to the last exceptions to the chill which has replaced the former promiscuous admiration.

His spirit must be hungrier for posthumous fame than even a bard's has a prescriptive right to be, if it be not content with the praise four pieces have never missed. And they deserve it. Hohenlinden, the pair of Naval songs, and The Soldier's Dream-in which even Tennyson could complain only of three consecutive sibilantshave earned a wreath which would adorn any singer's brow. The materials are of the simplest, approaching meagreness in the famous battle-songs; the effect was, and is, direct, unmistakable, and overwhelming. In an age remarkable for the gulf between the cultivated and the uncultivated, the merit of these was allowed by the highest intelligence; the meanest perfectly appreciated them. From the moment they were launched on the world they became national possessions, and have never ceased to be.

A hundred years of insular security have not muffled the double peal of defiance hurled by Campbell at a hostile Europe when Britain was still in the throes of a struggle for national existence :

Ye Mariners of England!

That guard our native seas;

Whose flag has braved, a thousand years,

The battle and the breeze!

Your glorious standard launch again

To match another foe!

And sweep through the deep,

While the stormy winds do blow;
While the battle rages loud and long,

And the stormy winds do blow.14

Little does it matter to the twin tribute to Nelson's 'glorious day', that, for entire sympathy with it, some sturdy insensibility to the niceties of international jurisprudence is needed. At all events it is-condoling mermaid and all-a noble beat to arms and dirge in one :

Now joy, Old England, raise !
For the tidings of thy might,
By the festal cities' blaze,

Whilst the wine-cup shines in light;
And yet amidst that joy and uproar,
Let us think of them that sleep,
Full many a fathom deep,

By thy wild and stormy steep,
Elsinore ! 15

To gauge the grandeur of such songs we have only to glance at Campbell's own drudging attempt to exalt the untoward victory of Navarino.16

And then there is a third martial lyric-Hohenlinden :
On Linden, when the sun was low,

All bloodless lay th' untrodden snow,
And dark as winter was the flow
Of Iser, rolling rapidly.

At first sight an ill-assorted paean this, over a bloody French triumph, to be associated with a pair of heroic British odes! But the air of Campbell's prime was surcharged with battle-steam. Also, it may well have been that to his fancy Moreau's overthrow of Austria was a victory of light over darkness. At any rate, poetically, the outburst ranks in perfection of simplicity with the two. It is not the mere 'drum and trumpet thing' decried by himself. Yet I should like to think that his habitual temper towards the murderous miseries of the Europe of his early manhood was more characteristically reflected in the music lingering long on the inner ear-music with a soul in it— of The Soldier's Dream:

Our bugles sang truce-for the night-cloud had lowered,
And the sentinel stars set their watch in the sky;
And thousands had sunk on the ground overpowered,
The weary to sleep, and the wounded to die.

When reposing that night on my pallet of straw,
By the wolf-scaring faggot that guarded the slain ;
At the dead of the night a sweet vision I saw,
And thrice ere the morning I dreamt it again.

Methought from the battle-field's dreadful array,
Far, far I had roam'd on a desolate track;
'Twas Autumn-and sunshine arose on the way

To the home of my fathers, that welcomed me back.

I flew to the pleasant fields traversed so oft

In life's morning march, when my bosom was young;
I heard my own mountain-goats bleating aloft,

And knew the sweet strain that the corn-reapers sung.

Then pledged we the wine-cup, and fondly I swore,
From my home and my weeping friends never to part;
My little ones kissed me a thousand times o'er,

And my wife sobbed aloud in her fullness of heart.

Stay, stay with us—rest, thou art weary and worn ;
And fain was their war-broken soldier to stay ;-
But sorrow returned with the dawning of morn;

And the voice in my dreaming ear melted away.18

One is tempted to discover a relation among the four; and certainly they insist upon withdrawing together from the miscellany of their author's work. They form a group apart. But the single intrinsic common quality they possess is negative: it is that we find it almost impossible to realize how and whence one and all emanated. Of their spiritual birth from Campbell in particular I see no trace. Not that, as I have shown, he could otherwise have been regarded as incapable of poetry of a high order. But the excellence itself of his more ordinary verse, as fixing his legitimate level, heightens the difficulty of accounting for the peculiar ascendancy of the sister Four. Kinship between them and verses to Caroline there is none. They are bolts from the blue; and this is the point of view from which contemporaries regarded them. I am not claiming for them that they are of the first rank. For that three of them at any rate want the indefinable something represented to my mind by atmosphere'. Their distinction is in a sense they produce of positive completeness which satisfies the judgement. To this is joined the more personal

feeling of surprise. Such as they are, they are immortal; it is impossible to think of them as doomed to oblivion.

The soil of poetry is indeed so variously constituted that abnormal growths may without warning be discovered in it at any moment. The strange thing is that Campbell's nature should have fostered them. I admire him, and do not think that he receives his proper share of educated applause at present. At the same time he does not give me the impression of capability for the unexpected. I should have supposed he knew what he could do, and undertook that, and nothing else; that his mind had always in advance a clear perception of practicable effects before he set to work at realizing them. His habit is to say outright what he has to say. He does not leave his readers to interpret his thought. Even in his moments of loftiest inspiration he is objective, not subjective. It is, however, I dare say, not necessarily inconsistent with this that, perhaps, after all, throughout his career he was always groping after his true poetic mission, without ever actually finding it. Therein may lie a clue, as well to the multifariousness of the forms his poetical impulses took, as to occasional flights, apparently unpremeditated. Equally it may explain his sudden folding, from time to time, of wings meant to bear him to the skies, which Scott attributed to 'fear of the shadow his own fame cast before him '.19 Thus the issue of his aspirations might be a great patriotic hymn, or a Domestic Tale. It might be a song worthy of Byron, or one too feeble for Thomas Haynes Bayly. He was ever feeling his way, and, I am afraid, never, to his own contentment, hit the direct track, before I, as a child—though not too young to have glowed with indignant pity for Sarmatia, fallen,

unwept, without a crime,