e only memory left: possession meagre;
Oh, never may that leave me, Lord, I pray.

PHILIP JAMES BAILEY

(1816-)

In Bailey we have a striking instance of the man whose reputation is
made suddenly by a single work, which obtains an amazing popularity, and
which is presently almost forgotten except as a name. When in 1839 the
long poem 'Festus' appeared, its author was an unknown youth, who had
hardly reached his majority. Within a few months he was a celebrity.
That so dignified and suggestive a performance should have come from so
young a poet was considered a marvel of precocity by the literary world,
both English and American.

The author of 'Festus' was born at Basford, Nottinghamshire, England,
April 22nd, 1816. Educated at the public schools of Nottingham, and at
Glasgow University, he studied law, and at nineteen entered Lincoln's
Inn. In 1840 he was admitted to the bar. But his vocation in life
appears to have been metaphysical and spiritual rather than legal.

His 'Festus: a Poem,' containing fifty-five episodes or successive
scenes,--some thirty-five thousand lines,--was begun in his twentieth
year. Three years later it was in the hands of the English reading
public. Like Goethe's 'Faust' in pursuing the course of a human soul
through influences emanating from the Supreme Good and the Supreme Evil;
in having Heaven and the World as its scene; in its inclusion of God and
the Devil, the Archangels and Angels, the Powers of Perdition, and
withal many earthly types in its action,--it is by no means a mere
imitation of the great German. Its plan is wider. It incorporates even
more impressive spiritual material than 'Faust' offers. Not only is its
mortal hero, Festus, conducted through an amazing pilgrimage, spiritual
and redeemed by divine Love, but we have in the poem a conception of
close association with Christianity, profound ethical suggestions, a
flood of theology and philosophy, metaphysics and science, picturing
Good and Evil, love and hate, peace and war, the past, the present, and
the future, earth, heaven, and hell, heights and depths, dominions,
principalities, and powers, God and man, the whole of being and of
not-being,--all in an effort to unmask the last and greatest secrets of
Infinity. And more than all this, 'Festus' strives to portray the
sufficiency of Divine Love and of the Divine Atonement to dissipate,
even to annihilate, Evil. For even Lucifer and the hosts of darkness ar