argued thus, and sought to reassure her more disconsolate companion, we need not inquire; but she kept up a brave front to misfortune, at any rate. Jeanne tried to persuade her companion to go back to Madame Farge, to stay there till the evening service, on account of the child, while she herself would remain on the watch, and promised to send her word at the first sight of the boat. Épiphanie did not leave Jeanne willingly; she clung to her hope-giving, cheery presence; but at last reluctantly obeyed, and Jeanne remained to watch and wait alone. As the day wore on to its close, the boats came in at greater intervals, and old Defére's boat was not among them. Jeanne chatted with the other women and one or two men who still remained on the pier, and lent a hand in towing in the boats as they arrived; but, as evening approached, and nearly all of the expected fishingcraft had found safe harborage, the number of spectators gradually diminished, and Jeanne was left with the few watchers who still remained.

As

it grew dark, the bell began to ring for evening service, and Épiphanie came hurrying along the pier, wrapped in her long cloak, under which the baby lay and slept, sheltered from the wind

and rain.

"Come, Jeanne," she said, "it is time to go up to the office. I have brought thee some supper down from Madame Farge; thou canst eat it as we go along."

So they went up together, stopping once or twice, with the involuntary curiosity of country women, to look into the shop windows, some of which were already lit up, and displayed their wares under the bright gaslight. As they crossed the market-place, the wind caught them, and, like a malignant spirit, seemed to hold them back from the church-porch. Out of the blustering storm they turned into the silence of the old church. The lights on the high altar faintly illuminated the chancel, but the great body of the nave and side aisles lay in gloom, the tall arches lost themselves in the sombre dimness

of the vaulted roof, and the glowing colors of the windows were fading slowly from their lovely twilight splendor.

The two women paused for a moment at the Shrine of the Entombment, and then passed up the church. Taking two of the innumerable chairs piled in a stack round one of the pillars near the chancel, they knelt down to pass the time before service in their private devotions. The church soon began to fill rapidly, the high vaulted roof reechoing to the constant slamming of the great padded door at the west entrance, as the crowd streamed in. The lights upon the high altar grew into full radiance, the long line of priests and choristers entered the chancel, and the service began.

It was the Feast of St. Michael and All Angels. Round the church beat the storm, howling through the flying buttresses, and lashing the rain against the windows. As the service went on, the monotonous chanting of the priests gave place to the organ and the voices of the choir; the sounds of storm without were drowned in the triumphant tones, and it seemed as if St. Michael and his hosts, "the shining squadrons of the sky," fought with the rebellious spirits of the air, and drove them back with sweet tones of angelic victory.

The two women knelt side by side in the strange companionship and isolation of their devotion. Each joined devoutly in the triumphant service of the church, and yet each poured into it the warm life of her own heart with its individual longings and grief. Jeanne's face was raised, and her eyes were fixed on the high altar and its blazing lights. The warm light, falling full upon her front, made her like some glowing picture as she knelt, with her high, white Norman cap and scarlet bodice, the trembling ear-rings and the chain about her throat, her soft and shining hair that fell beneath her cap, her clasped hands, and fervent, upturned face. Épiphanie cradled her baby in her arms that rested on the top of her chair, and her

pale face was bent over the rosy, sleeping child, that lay against her bosom; her lips moved with her prayers, her brother and the fishing-boats were in her thoughts, and every angry gust that blustered round the church increased the sickening pangs of her anxiety; for years of care had worn away the youthful spring of her spirit, and self-distrust and despondency were almost natural to her.

It had been well for Jeanne that she had had others to think of all day; she had carried the child for Épiphanie, and spoken words of cheer to many an anxious watcher on the pier, and this had given her more comfort than she herself knew of at the time. When Epiphanie took the child from her arms, and knelt down, Jeanne understood that her care was set aside. Epiphanie had thrown herself and her anxieties and sadness on a stronger arm, and for the time needed Jeanne no longer. Poor Jeanne! now she must think of herself and her own troubles, - of her father, - of Gabriel!

She repeated her usual prayers, but they had neither strength nor savor as heretofore, for all was confusion within. There was fear for her father and poor François, and in her heart, buffeted and tossed by doubt and perplexity, rung her angry parting words with Gabriel. She bowed her head, while the floods of a bitter humiliation passed over her. Suddenly a cry rose in her heart with all the vehemence of youth and strength. "Spare his life, spare but his life, O God! His anger may remain; we may never be at peace again any more, if that be thy will; but from the horror of death and danger O save him, Good Lord!" For clear and strong before her had risen a vision of Gabriel encompassed with danger; it impressed itself upon her mind with importunate persistency and the clear horror of reality; and in that moment in which she learned that the withdrawal of his love must be as the darkening of her life, she accepted this if it were the alternative of his death, and prayed for his life alone.

magazine

were two imitators of Spenser,- Phine

genius of Spenser. In the present we propose to speak of a few of his more eminent contemporaries and successors, who were rated as poets in their own generation, however neglected they may be in ours. We shall select those who have some pretensions to originality of character as well as mind; and though there is no space to mention all who claim the attention of students of literary history, we fear we shall gain the gratitude of the reader for those omitted, rather than for those included, in the survey. Sins of omission are sometimes exalted by circumstances into a high rank among the negative virtues.

Among the minor poets of this era

ins of Fletcher the dramatist, but with none of his wild blood in their veins, and none of his flashing creativeness in their souls, to give evidence of the relationship. "The Purple Island," a poem in twelve cantos, by Phineas, is a long allegorical description of the body and soul of man, perverse in design, melodious in expression, occasionally felicitous in the personification of abstract qualities, but on the whole to be considered as an exercise of boundless ingenuity to produce insufferable tediousness. Not in the dissecting-room itself is anatomy less poetical than in the harmonious stanzas of "The Purple Island." Giles, the

brother of Phineas, was the more potent spirit of the two, but his power is often directed by a taste even more elaborately bad. His poem of "Christ's Victory and Triumph," in parts almost sublime, in parts almost puerile, is a proof that imaginative fertility may exist in a mind without any imaginative grasp. Campbell, however, considers him a connecting link between Spenser and Milton.

Samuel Daniel, another poet of this period, was the son of a music-master,

and was born in 1562. Fuller says of him, that "he carried, in his Christian and surname, two holy prophets, his monitors, so to qualify his raptures that he abhorred all profaneness." Amiable in character, gentle in disposition, and with a genius meditative rather than energetic, he appears to have possessed that combination of qualities which makes men personally pleasing if it does not make them permanently famous. He was patronized both by Elizabeth and James, was the friend of Shakespeare and Camden, and was highly esteemed by the most accomplished women of his time. A most voluminous writer in prose and verse, he was distinguished in both for the purity, simplicity, and elegance of his diction. Browne calls him "the welllanguaged Daniel." But if he avoided the pedantry and quaintness which were too apt to vitiate the style of the period, and wrote what might be called modern English, it has still been found that modern Englishmen cannot be coaxed into reading what is so lucidly written. His longest work, a versified History of the Civil Wars, dispassionate as a chronicle and unimpassioned as a poem, is now only read by those critics in whom the sense of duty is victorious over the disposition to doze. The best expressions of his pensive, tender, and thoughtful nature are his epistles and his sonnets. Among the epistles, that to the Countess of Cumberland is the best. It is a model for all adulatory addresses to women; indeed, a masterpiece of subtile compliment; for it assumes in its object a sympathy with

whatever is noblest in sentiment, and an understanding of whatever is most elevated in thought. The sonnets, first published in 1592, in his thirtieth year, record the strength and the disappointment of a youthful passion. The lady, whom he addresses under the name of Delia, refused him, it is said, for a wealthier lover, and the pang of this baffled affection made him wretched for years, and sent him

"Haunting untrodden paths to wail apart."

Echo,- he tells us, while he was aiming to overcome the indifference of the

maiden, —

"Echo, daughter of the air,

Babbling guest of rocks and rills,
Knows the name of my fierce fair,

And sounds the accents of my ills."

Throughout the sonnets, the matchless perfection of this Delia is ever connected with her disdain of the poet who celebrates it:

"Fair is my love, and cruel as she's fair;

Her brow shades frowns, although her eyes are

sunny;

Her smiles are lightning, though her pride despair;

And her disdains are gall, her favors honey. A modest maid, decked with a blush of honor, Who treads along green paths of youth and love, The wonder of all eyes that gaze upon her,

Sacred on earth, designed a saint above."

This picture of the "modest maid, decked with a blush of honor," is exquisite; but it is still a picture, and not a living presence. Shakespeare, touching the same beautiful object with his life-imparting imagination, suffuses at once the sense and soul with a feeling of the vital reality, when he describes rosed over with the virgin crimson of the French princess as a "maiden

modesty."

The richest and most elaborately fanciful of these sonnets is that in which the poet calls upon his mistress to give back her perfections to the objects from

which she derived them :-
"Restore thy tresses to the golden ore;

Yield Cytherea's son those arcs of love;
Bequeath the heavens the stars that I adore;
And to the orient do thy pearls remove.
Yield thy hand's pride unto the ivory white;
To Arabian odors give thy breathing sweet;
Restore thy blush unto Aurora bright;
To Thetis give the honor of thy feet.

Let Venus have thy graces, her resigned;
And thy sweet voice give back unto the spheres ;
But yet restore thy fierce and cruel mind

To Hyrcan tigers and to ruthless bears; Yield to the marble thy hard heart again; So shalt thou cease to plague and I to pain." There is a fate in love. This man, who could not conquer the insensibility of one country girl, was the honored friend of the noblest and most celebrated woman of his age. Eventually, at the age of forty, he was married to a sister of John Florio, to whom his own sister, the Rosalind who jilted Spenser, is supposed to have been previously united. He died in retirement, in 1619, in his fifty-eighth year.

A more powerful and a more prolific poet than Daniel was Michael Drayton, who rhymed steadily for some forty years, and produced nearly a hundred thousand lines. The son of a butcher, and born about the year 1563, he early exhibited an innocent desire to be a poet, and his first request to his tutor at college was to make him one. Like Daniel, he enjoyed the friendship and patronage of the noble favorers of learning and genius. His character seems to have been irreproachable. Meres, in his "Wit's Treasury," says of him, that among all sorts of people "he is held as a man of virtuous disposition, honest conversation, and wellgoverned carriage, which is almost miraculous among good wits in these declining and corrupt times, when there is nothing but roguery in villanous man; and when cheating and craftiness is counted the cleanest wit and soundest wisdom." But the marketvalue, both of his poetry and virtue, was small, and he seems to have been always on bad terms with the booksellers. His poems, we believe, were the first which arrived at second editions by the simple process of merely reprinting the title-pages of the first, a fact which is ominous of his bad success with the public. The defect of his mind was not the lack of materials, but the lack of taste to select, and imagination to fuse, his materials. His poem of "The Barons' Wars" is a metrical chronicle; his "Poly-Olbion" is an enormous piece

of metrical topography, extending to thirty thousand twelve-syllabled lines. In neither poem does he view his subject from an eminence, but doggedly follows the course of events and the succession of objects. His "Poly-Olbion" is in general so accurate as a description of England, that it is quoted as authority by such antiquaries as Hearne and Wood and Nicholson. Campbell has felicitously touched its fatal defect in saying that Drayton "chained his poetry to the map." The only modern critic who seems to have followed all its wearisome details with loving enthusiasm is Charles Lamb, who speaks of Drayton as that "panegyrist of my native earth who has gone over her soil with the fidelity of a herald and the painful love of a son; who has not left a rivulet (so narrow that it may be stepped over) without honorable mention; and has animated hills and streams with life and passion above the dreams of old mythology." But, in spite of this warm commendation, the essential difficulty with the "PolyOlbion" is, that, with all its merits, it is unreadable. The poetic feeling, the grace, the freshness, the pure, bright, and vigorous diction, which characterize it, appear to more advantage in his minor poems, where his subjects are less unwieldy, and the vivacity of his fancy makes us forget his lack of high imagination. His fairy poem of " Nymphidia," for instance, is one of the most deliciously fanciful creations in the language; and many of his smaller pieces have the point and sparkle of Carew's and Suckling's. In reading, too, his longer poems, we frequently light upon passages as perfect of their kind as this description of Queen Isabella's hand: :

"She laid her fingers on his manly cheek.

The God's pure sceptres and the darts of love,
That with their touch might make a tiger meek,
Or might great Atlas from his seat remove.
So white, so soft, so delicate, so sleck,

As she had worn a lily for a glove."
A more popular poet than Daniel, or
Drayton, or the Fletchers, was William
Warner, an attorney of the Common
Pleas, who was born about the year

His

1558, and who died in 1609. "Albion's England," a poem of some ten thousand verses, was published in 1586, ran through six editions in sixteen years, and died out of the memory of mankind with the last, in 1612. After having conscientiously waded through such immense masses of uninteresting rhyme, as we have been compelled to do in the preparation of these notices, we confess, with a not unmalicious exultation, that we know Warner's poem only by description and extracts. Albion is a general name for both Scotland and England; and Albion's England is a metrical history -"not barren," in the author's own words, "of inventive intermixtures " of the southern portion of the island, beginning at the deluge, and ending with the reign of James I. As James might have said, anticipating Metternich, "after me the deluge," Warner's poem may be considered as ending in some such catastrophe as it began. The merit of Warner is that of a storyteller, and he reached classes of readers to whom Spenser was hardly known by name. The work is a strange mixture of comic and tragic fact and fable, exceedingly gross in parts, with little power of imagination or grace of language, but possessing the great popular excellence of describing persons and incidents in the fewest and simplest words. The best story is that of Argentile and Curan, and it is told as briefly as though it were intended for transmission by telegraph at the cost of a dollar a word. Warner has some occasional touches of nature and pathos which almost rival the old ballads for directness and intensity of feeling. The most remarkable of these, condensed in two of his long fourteensyllabled lines, is worth all the rest of his poems. It is where he represents Queen Eleanor as striking the fair Rosamond: :

the poet of the populace, to Donne, the poet of the metaphysicians, but the range of the Elizabethan mind is full of contrasts. In the words of the satirist, Donne is a poet, —

"Whose muse on dromedary trots, Wreathes iron pokers into true love-knots; Rhyme's sturdy cripple, fancy's maze and clue, Wit's forge and fire-blast, meaning's press and

screw.

See lewdness with theology combined,
A cynic and a sycophantic mind,

A fancy shared party per pale between Death's heads and skeletons and Aretine! Not his peculiar defect and crime, But the true current mintage of the time. Such were the established signs and tokens given To mark a loyal churchman, sound and even, Free from papistic and fanatic leaven." John Donne, the ludicrous complexity of whose intellect and character is thus maliciously sketched, was one of the strangest of versifiers, sermonizers, and men. He was the son of a wealthy London merchant, and was born in 1573. One of those youthful prodigies who have an appetite for learning as other boys have an appetite for cakes and plums, he was, at the age of eleven, sufficiently advanced in his studies to enter the University of Oxford, where he remained three years. He was then transferred to Cambridge. His classical and mathematical education being thus completed, he, at the age of seventeen, was admitted into Lincoln's Inn to study the law. His relations being Roman Catholics, he abandoned, at the age of nineteen, the law, in order to make an elaborate examination of the points in dispute between the Romanists and the Reformed churches. Having in a year's time exhausted this controversy, he spent several years in travelling in Italy and Spain. On his return to England he was made chief secretary of Lord Chancellor Ellesmere,

an office which he held five years. It was probably during the period between his twentieth and thirtieth years that most of his secular poetry was written,

double red:

Hard was the heart that gave the blow, soft were

those lips that bled."