chool, frail and tremulous bodies unfitted for the labour of life,
and landscape where subtle rhythms of colour and of form have overcome the
clear outline of things as we see them in the labour of life.

There has been a like change in England, but it has come more gradually
and is more mixed with lesser changes than in France. The poetry which
found its expression in the poems of writers like Browning and of
Tennyson, and even of writers, who are seldom classed with them, like
Swinburne, and like Shelley in his earlier years, pushed its limits as far
as possible, and tried to absorb into itself the science and politics, the
philosophy and morality of its time; but a new poetry, which is always
contracting its limits, has grown up under the shadow of the old. Rossetti
began it, but was too much of a painter in his poetry to follow it with a
perfect devotion; and it became a movement when Mr. Lang and Mr. Gosse and
Mr. Dobson devoted themselves to the most condensed of lyric poems, and
when Mr. Bridges, a more considerable poet, elaborated a rhythm too
delicate for any but an almost bodiless emotion, and repeated over and
over the most ancient notes of poetry, and none but these. The poets who
followed have either, like Mr. Kipling, turned from serious poetry
altogether, and so passed out of the processional order, or speak out of
some personal or spiritual passion in words and types and metaphors that
draw one's imagination as far as possible from the complexities of modern
life and thought. The change has been more marked in English painting,
which, when intense enough to belong to the procession order, began to
cast out things, as they are seen by minds plunged in the labour of life,
so much before French painting that ideal art is sometimes called English
art upon the Continent.

I see, indeed, in the arts of every country those faint lights and faint
colours and faint outlines and faint energies which many call 'the
decadence,' and which I, because I believe that the arts lie dreaming of
things to come, prefer to call the autumn of the body. An Irish poet whose
rhythms are like the cry of a sea-bird in autumn twilight has told its
meaning in the line, 'The very sunlight's weary, and it's time to quit the
plough.' Its importance is the greater because it comes to us at the
moment when we are beginning to be interested in many things which
positive science, the interpreter of exterior law, has always denied:
communio