r subject promising a
classic entertainment, almost unaware bring you home.--No! after all,
it is not imagined Greece, dreamy, antique Sicily, but the present
world about us, though mistakable for a moment, delightfully, for the
land, the age, of Sappho, of Theocritus:--

There is no amaranth, no pomegranate here,
But can your heart forget the Christmas rose,
The crocuses and snowdrops once so dear?

Quite congruously with the placid, erudite, quality of his culture,
although, like other poets, he sings much of youth, he is often most
successful in the forecast, the expression, of the humours, the
considerations, that in truth are more proper to old age:--

When age comes by and lays his frosty hands
So lightly on mine eyes, that, scarce aware

[115]

Of what an endless weight of gloom they bear,
I pause, unstirred, and wait for his commands.
When time has bound these limbs of mine with bands,
And hushed mine ears, and silvered all my hair,
May sorrow come not, nor a vain despair
Trouble my soul that meekly girdled stands.

As silent rivers into silent lakes,
Through hush of reeds that not a murmur breaks,
Wind, mindful of the poppies whence they came,
So may my life, and calmly burn away,
As ceases in a lamp at break of day
The flagrant remnant of memorial flame.

Euthanasia!--Yet Mr. Gosse, with all his accomplishment, is still a
young man. His youthful confidence in the perpetuity of poetry, of the
poetical interests in life, creed-less as he may otherwise seem to be,
is, we think, a token, though certainly an unconscious token, of the
spontaneous originality of his muse. For a writer of his peculiar
philosophic tenets, at all events, the world itself, in truth, must
seem irretrievably old or even decadent.

Old, decadent, indeed, it would seem with Mr. Gosse to be also
returning to the thoughts, the fears, the consolations, of its youth in
Greece, in Italy:--

[116]

Nor seems it strange indeed
To hold the happy creed
That all fair things that bloom and die
Have conscious life as well as I.

Then let me joy to be
Alive with bird and tree,
And have no haughtier aim than this,
To be a partner in their bliss.

Convinced, eloquent,--again and again the notes of Epicurean philosophy
fall almost unconsciously from his lips. With poetry at hand, he
appears to feel no misgivings. A large faith he might seem to have in
what is called "natural optim