blazonry of external nature in which for some time after its first introduction it reveled with delight. We have indicated that Mr. Kingsley is a greater artist in prose than in verse. He has treated this subject in both ways. We will cite two nearly parallel passages, and leave it to our readers to decide whether the comparison does not, as far as a single instance can go, corroborate our judgment. The conditions, indeed, of the comparison are in favor of the poetry, for the passage is one of imaginative description, better suited to verse than to prose; and in the prose the native luxuriousness of the author's fancy is under restraint for the perusal of boys and maidens: "Promise me, and seal it with a kiss.' "Then she lifted up her face and kissed him; and Perseus laughed for joy, and flew upward, while Andromeda crouched trembling on the rock, waiting for what might befall. "On came the great sea-monster, coasting "Kiss me but once, and I go.' along like a huge black galley, lazily breasting the ripple, and stopping at times by creek or headland, to watch for the laughter of girls at hills, or boys bathing on the beach. His great their bleaching, or cattle pawing on the sandsides were fringed with clustering shells and sea-weeds, and the water gurgled in and out of his wide jaws, as he rolled along, dripping and glistening in the beams of the morning sun. "At last he saw Andromeda, and shot forward to take his prey, while the waves foamed white behind him, and before him the fish fled leaping. "Then down from the hight of the air fell Perseus, like a shooting star, down to the crests of the waves, while Andromeda hid her face as he shouted; and then there was silence for a while. "At last she looked up trembling, and saw Perseus springing toward her; and instead of the monster a long black rock with the sea rippling quietly round it. "Who then so proud as Perseus, as he leapt back to the rock, and lifted his fair Andromeda in his arms and flew with her to the cliff-top, as a falcon carries a dove ?" Then lifting her neck, like a sea-bird Loosing his arms from her waist he flew upward awaiting the sea-beast. Lazily breasting the ripple, and watching by sandbar and headland, Beautiful, eager, triumphant, he leaped back again to his treasure ;. These passages are so much alike, that | example of the beauty of Mr. Kingsley's it may be well, perhaps, to cite another descriptive prose. It is a picture of the 1 sirens singing in the setting sun. Both | Elizabeth of Hungary is in great measure quotations, it is scarcely necessary to say, are from his charming English remoulding of the myths of the Greek heroes: "And all things staid around and listened; the gulls sat in white lines along the rocks; on the beach great seals lay basking, and kept time with lazy heads; while silver shoals of fish came up to hearken, and whispered as they broke the shining calm. The Wind overhead hushed his whistling, as he shepherded his clouds toward the west; and the clouds stood in mid blue, and listened dreaming, like a flock of golden sheep." an exception to the remarks we have just made. The author is at once supported and confined by the possession of biosonal image grows dim, when contrasted graphical detail. Yet even here the perwith the singular vividness with which the ideas and feelings are depicted. For the author has not only the prophetic fire, but is potent to describe the rush of strong feelings; and this, again, you see clearly from the tone of his writing, is not done so much through the imagination, as because a strong and full current runs through his own veins. Conrad is not a man, but Mr. Kingsley's idea of a priest; and the subordinate characters are unsteadily drawn and common-place, conversing in a language equally remote from the reality of our day and their own. St. Maura is an exercise in the school of Tennyson. How little Mr. Kingsley is fitted to move in verse is shown by the exactness with which he follows the rhythm and versification of his model; a couple of lines will show exactly what we mean: "I rose and tried to go; But all the eyes had vanished, and the judge; And all the buildings melted into mist. It is shown, too, by the superiority of his verse, wherever, as in the Andromeda, St. Maura, and the Longbeards' Saga, he has some definite mould on which to shape it. For its matter, the St. Maura is fervid and eloquent; and Mr. Kingsley is rarely seen to more advantage than when he can be fervid and eloquent. Yet, with our best efforts, we can not stifle an impression that it is somewhat turgid and unreal. Mr. Kingsley is not only more a preacher than a poet, he is more an historian than a poet. His leading impulse is to give to his own ideas a vivid expression and form calculated to secure the adhesion of others; but more than this, he has little sympathy with the individual forms of life in which the poet most delights. The highest poetic working is that which creates an individual who is representative of much beyond himself; and the poetic imagination is most deeply impressed with special phenomena. Mr. Kingsley, like many others, works in the opposite direction; he imagines the type, has that clearly before him, and strives to embody it in an individual form. His insight is into the features of a time; and both his sympathies and his imagination are attracted by bodies of thought, by ideas common to many men. His characters are powerfully drawn; figures each not so much of a man as of a sort of man. And kinds of men, and directions of thought, he sees into with clearness, and describes with singular force; yet the accuracy of his insight and truth of his delineations are always subordinated to The natural man will kick against the his vehement desire to enunciate his own sermon. He rebels at the under-current convictions, and liable to be distorted by of moral admonition which underlies it. We do not say that the moral tem- every line of Mr. Kingsley's writing. We perament which leads to these results is tire of the noblest actions and the finest not greater than a cold artistic faculty sentiments set forth on paper with so much like that of Goethe; we only say it is un- pomp of diction. We love to let both wise in one thus constituted to grasp at deeds and people recommend themselves. the power of expressing himself in the If you wish to make a man universally highest forms of art. It is something to hated, you have only to press him upon be a fox-hunter, a clergyman, a reformer, every body as a paragon; if you wish to a fly-fisher, a naturalist, and a novelist. make people see the defects and shortWith so many claims on our respect, Mr. comings of a great action, or of a certain Kingsley should have spared us the draw- set of principles, you have only to insist ings in "The Heroes," and also these upon them sufficiently, and you beget a minor poems. The Saint's Tragedy, reäction. The best things are placed at a no man can wish unwritten. May it live disadvantage, if you will go on writing to exert its influence on many generations! | about them. Thus a manly character is a thing to be desired, and manly exercises are noble in their way. But they better bear to be practiced than extolled. Hunting and fishing are admirable pastimes under the open air of heaven; but it is astonishing how soon they become bores in books. It is all very well to wade up to your middle from the simple desire to catch fish; but to make incessant demands in print upon the admiration of your fellow-creatures because you are fond of catching fish, is not very well; it soon becomes tiresome, in fact; and to indulge contempt for all those who have not the skill or opportunity to catch trout and salmon, is unchristian. It is a fine thing to ride well to hounds; but it is both more exciting and less fatiguing to go across country than through the recommendatory literature on the subject. We have had enough for the present of "the dappled darlings," "hark forwards," etc., both in prose and verse. Shooting and skating are delightful; but nothing shall persuade us that a north-easter is not a disagreeable accompaniment. Let us enjoy ourselves as of old, without so much fuss, and without thinking ourselves or others eminently virtuous or distinguished for doing so. Already there are signs of a reäction; an eminent contemporary has fallen back on Harry and Lucy, and Sanford and Merton, and disinterred the old notion that the mind is greater than the body. And so it is of other things. Who doubts the sweetness or the value of the household ties and affections? But if you insist on saying so much about them, men will turn their eyes elsewhere, and discover some other claim to their respect and admiration than that of being the father of a family. Things excellent in themselves are better treated simply than with any approach to ostentatiousness or exaggeration. and may become almost as dangerous a mode of unfringing that unconsciousness which is of the essence of purity. And it is not too much to say, that Mr. Kingsley's temperament and taste do not fit him very exactly for dealing with this sort of subject-matter. It is not that he is too outspoken a more simple and direct out-speaking would be more to our taste than the guarded suggestions of Mr. Kingsley's writing; it is that the debatable landmarks of modesty have a sort of charm for him, and he is too fond of being near the boundary. Matters innocent and even beautiful in themselves do not always bear allusion; the roots of passion, like those of blossoming roses, are hidden in the ground. A wise writer will eschew fastidiousness both of phrase and matter; and false delicacy is the bane of true modesty. We have no quarrel with Mr. Kingsley for boldly handling subjects that seem to him require it, though they should be without the pale of the conventional proprieties; what we dislike is, that he sometimes sways the thoughts of his readers in directions inconsistent with the truest delicacy. As modesty vails the person, so it vails a thousand other things; and it is no defense of an allusion to these in print to say that in themselves they are infinitely sound, pure, and healthy. A warm temperament should distrust itself with the pen. Fielding had a fund of natural delicacy, yet he can not be said to be always a delicate writer; and Mr. Kingsley has one or two things which might have been written by the author of the description of Mrs. Waters, had he taken orders and been submitted to the restraints of the nineteenth century. Apart from these considerations, Mr. Kingsley's whole position needs a very careful and firm footing. He has taken the energetic healthy animal man under his protection; but the healthy animal man is generally pretty well able to defend himself, and needs but gentle stimulants to his appetites, his anger, or even his love of physical excitement. There is another subject to which it is impossible to help some allusion in the discussion of any part of Mr. Kingsley's writings. Those who have called him the "Apostle of the Flesh," have just that degree of truth with them which makes But we are in danger of wandering from a caricature telling. He is the emphatic our present limited subject, Mr. Kingsley's denouncer of prudery, than which there poems. As for his other works, with all is nothing more detestable; the warm their failings, he has scattered many a defender of family ties and household handful of good seed in the English field. affections, than which there are no things As for the poetry, indifferent as it is, a more pure and more sacred. But he does cultivated mind and a noble nature shine not seem always aware that to praise is through it as the light through an illalmost as delicate a matter as to condemn, | adapted lantern. Mr. Kingsley is not a poet the Saint's Tragedy, is far from that it is for the interest of all literature being all a tragedy should be; yet, how that those who are deeply and justly adever in our colder critical moods we may mired should have their claims strictly judge of its artistic merits, there are pas- examined. An unqualified reception of sages in it the recollection of which seems the present volume as good poetry would to make criticism detraction, and our brief not be desirable in itself, nor creditable to analysis of the author's genius an imperti- the character of English readers. And it would be so, were it not nence. From the North British Review. EGYPT AND SYRIA WESTERN INFLUENCE.* THE East, be it Persia, or Syria, or Egypt, does not by any means fulfill the the dreams which most of us have had of it. He that has caught up visions of its splendor from the Ghazels of Hâfiz, or the Lalla Rookh of Moore, will feel considerably angry when he discovers the extent to which he has been duped by a large class of poets to whom it has furnished poetical capital almost inexhaustible, and who, in regard to it, have drawn as largely upon their own fancy as upon the credulity of the untraveled multitude. The myrtle hedge-rows of the Shûbra, the "gardens of gul in their bloom," the olive and orange groves, "The shining streams, with ranks Of golden melons on their banks-" the note of the turtle, the song of the nightingale, the hum of the wild bee, the spicy breezes, the "unclouded skies of Peristân;" these, with the beauteous forms and faces, too fair for earth, have been the materials out of which we of the cold cloudy North have constructed an Orient liker some Paradise that was never lost than a region of man's fallen earth. A few days' residence in an Oriental city, be it Cairo or Constantinople, a few weeks' travel through these regions of wonder, say the banks of the Nile or the Ghôr of Jordan, would modify the enthusiasm of many a modern admirer of "the land of the sun." Still it is a wondrous clime; so rich in its fruits, so gay in its flowers, so luscious. in its odors, the land of the palm and pomegranate, the vine and the olive; and withal so exquisitely sunny! What sunshine is that which bathes you as you sit gazing round you from the broad top of the old Pyramid of Cheops, or from which you hide yourself amid the giant-ruins of Abu-Sembel or Karnac, or through which you cut your way, as through liquid silver, in your white-sailed Nile boat! There is no sunshine like it; no where else does it seem so unmixed and unalloyed. Pass out of Egypt into the eastern desert; take your camel and pace along the shore of the Elanitic gulf, from Râs Mohammed to Kalat Akabah; from that take your way to Wady Mûsa, and wander amid the ruins of Petra; it is still the same pure from the seams or splits in the bastion walls; the oranges gleamed from beneath their freckled foliage; the karab and the prickly pear were beginning to look out for spring; while the carnation and the lily, luxuriating in the bright air, proclaimed themselves the winter flowers of this sunny isle. sunshine. Pass out of the desert into Syria; sit down by the two wells of Bir es-Seba, or on the margin of Bahr Lût, under the reflection of the hills of Moab, or under the palms of Jenîn, or on the western slopes of the great Lebanon, with the blue sea before you and the long ridges of snow above your head; you are still conscious of being shone upon by a sunlight purer and more intense than you have known amid your northern mists. An Arab, gasping with heat and thirst on the broad sand plain of Debbet Ramleh, might sigh for the coolness of the soberer West, as we do in our dreams for the glow of "the delicious East;" you your self, climbing up the steep defiles of Et-worldliness which finds fullest vent to itTih, might long for a cloudier sky; but still you can not help acknowledging the purity of the matchless sunshine, All Valetta was in gala dress, tricked out for holiday, the Church's choicest holiday. Yet with the significance of that holiday nothing was in keeping; and all that was seen or heard seemed, if not a burlesque upon the ecclesiastical symbolism of the season, at least an inebriate outburst of that strange kind of extreme self in connection with the scenic ritualism of corrupted Christianity. There was naught to recall the Babe of Bethlehem, Of natural phenomena this perhaps the Child of the stable and the manger. strikes a Western most, and for a time The purple robe, the reed, the mock homakes the East so exhilarating. Its in- mage, these rather suggested themselves fluence on character, morality, govern- to the muser, whatever they might do to ment, religion, is not now under discus- the participator of the glittering mockery. sion. Most certainly climate gives a Religion and revel; worship and frolic; helping hand to mould all these. Every the confessional and the tavern; the thing in a country that is permanent goes church and the opera; the penance and to form the characteristics of the nation, be the sensuality; these were the alternations it mountain, or sea, or clouds, or sunshine. of the day for which the population was The life and habits of a people are, to bustling to prepare. The tall yellow a large extent, moulded by their climate houses; the strait steep streets, with the and the peculiarities of their land. Ori- bold auberges of the Templar age projectentalisms and Occidentalisms are not alto-ing at intervals; the frequent statues of gether capricious and arbitrary. Many of them are the offspring of the sky and soil. Certain features must always be peculiar to certain nations, not merely because of their ancestry, but because of their physical distinctions; and though, to some extent, there may be a fusion of these, an interchange of peculiarities, yet there are certain great ridges or outlines whic must remain unobliterated and almost unsoftened. Not very far from our shores, and under our dominion, there lies a singular specimen of the East. A Mediterranean island, four days' journey from Dover, will introduce the traveler into some of the "lights and shades" of Oriental life. guardian saints; the massive churches, that to the stranger seem half Eastern and half-Western, half-Arabic, half-Gre cian, in their architecture; the varied dress of the men, and the sly faldette of the women; the crowds of sauntering priests, each one a Silenus or a Bacchus ; the scores of British soldiers idling in the shade or drinking in the café; these are some of the sights that give to the traveler characteristic specimens of the island on whose white rocks he is treading. Malta is truly the East, more so than Alexandria. In the latter the West meets the East, and prodominates; in the former the East meets the West, and predominates. Lower Egypt is Occidental; It was Christmas day in Malta. No Middle Egypt is Oriental, (Cairo, its chief English June could breathe more of sum- city, more Oriental than Calcutta ;) Upmer than this Mediterranean December: per Egpyt, with its temples, tombs, and the sunlight was superbly yet calmly pyramids, represents the extinct dynasties brilliant; the scorching bite of the sirocco and tribes of far antiquity. Malta is all had not yet found its way across the wave Eastern, save in religion. The rock itself from the Lybian furnace where it is gene-is a fragment of Africa; but the religion rated; the caper-plant hung itself out is not from Mecca, but Rome, one of the |