jacket, I know him afar;
How nice," cry the ladies, "looks yonder Hussar_!"

It needs a peculiar lightness of hand to give grace to these
colloquial numbers, and the author of _Ionica_ is more at home in the
dryad-haunted forest with Comatas. In combining classic sentiment with
purely English landscape he is wonderfully happy.

There is not a jarring image or discordant syllable to break the
glassy surface of this plaintive _Dirge_:

_Naiad, hid beneath the bank
By the willowy river-side,
Where Narcissus gently sank,
Where unmarried Echo died,
Unto thy serene repose
Waft the stricken Anteros.

Where the tranquil swan is borne,
Imaged in a watery glass,
Where the sprays of fresh pink thorn
Stoop to catch the boats that pass,
Where the earliest orchis grows,
Bury thou fair Anteros.

On a flickering wave we gaze,
Not upon his answering eyes:
Flower and bird we scarce can praise,
Having lost his sweet replies:
Cold and mute the river flows
With our tears for Anteros_.

We know well where this place of burial is to be. Not in some glade
of Attica or by Sicilian streams, but where a homelier river gushes
through the swollen lock at Bray, or shaves the smooth pastoral
meadows at Boveney, where Thames begins to draw a longer breath for
his passage between Eton and Windsor.

The prevailing sentiment of these poems is a wistful clinging to
this present life, a Pagan optimism which finds no fault with human
existence save that it is so brief. It gains various expression in
words that seem hot on a young man's lips, and warm on the same lips
even when no longer young:

_I'll borrow life, and not grow old;
And nightingales and trees
Shall keep me, though the veins be cold,
As young as Sophocles_.

And again, in poignant notes:

_You promise heavens free from strife,
Pure truth, and perfect change of will;
But sweet, sweet is this human life,
So sweet, I fain would breathe it still;
Your chilly stars I can forego,
This warm, kind world is all I know_.

This last quotation is from the poem called _Mimnermus in Church_. In
this odd title he seems to refer to elegies of the Colophonian poet,
who was famous in antiquity for the plaintive stress which he laid on
the necessity of extracting from life all it had to offer, since there
was nothing beyond mortal love, which was the life of life. The author
of _Ionica_ seems to bring the old