ent? That is a melancholy question,
which I shall try to answer (with doubt and dread enough) in my next
letter. {1}

OF MODERN ENGLISH POETRY

My dear Wincott,--I hear that a book has lately been published by an
American lady, in which all the modern poets are represented. The
singers have been induced to make their own selections, and put forward,
as Mr. Browning says, their best foot, anapaest or trochee, or whatever
it may be. My information goes further, and declares that there are but
eighteen poets of England to sixty inspired Americans.

This Western collection of modern minstrelsy shows how very dangerous it
is to write even on the English poetry of the day. Eighteen is long odds
against a single critic, and Major Bellenden, in "Old Mortality," tells
us that three to one are odds as long as ever any warrior met
victoriously, and that warrior was old Corporal Raddlebanes.

I decline the task; I am not going to try to estimate either the eighteen
of England or the sixty of the States. It is enough to speak about three
living poets, in addition to those masters treated of in my last letter.
Two of the three you will have guessed at--Mr. Swinburne and Mr. William
Morris. The third, I dare say, you do not know even by name. I think he
is not one of the English eighteen--Mr. Robert Bridges. His muse has
followed the epicurean maxim, and chosen the shadowy path, _fallentis
semita vitae_, where the dew lies longest on the grass, and the red rowan
berries droop in autumn above the yellow St. John's wort. But you will
find her all the fresher for her country ways.

My knowledge of Mr. William Morris's poetry begins in years so far away
that they seem like reminiscences of another existence. I remember
sitting beneath Cardinal Beaton's ruined castle at St. Andrews, looking
across the bay to the sunset, while some one repeated "Two Red Roses
across the Moon." And I remember thinking that the poem was nonsense.
With Mr. Morris's other early verses, "The Defence of Guinevere," this
song of the moon and the roses was published in 1858. Probably the
little book won no attention; it is not popular even now. Yet the lyrics
remain in memories which forget all but a general impression of the vast
"Earthly Paradise," that huge decorative poem, in which slim maidens and
green-clad men, and waters wan, and flowering apple trees, and rich
palaces are all mingled as on some long ancient tapestry, shaken a littl