Yes, as my swift days near their goal,
'Tis all that I implore;

In life and death, a chainless soul,

With courage to endure.

This, however, belongs rather to strength; though with pathetic leanings.

The consciousness of having done our part in life, and of having fairly participated in its enjoyments, reconciles us to quitting the scene in the ripeness of our days. The affection of friends co-operates with this source of consolation.

Funeral rites, mourning and memorials are at once a partial consolation to the living for the loss of friends, and a slight amelioration of the prospect of death. They are also regarded as one of the institutions for gratifying our sociable likings.

The consoling figures of Sleep, Rest, Repose, end of Trouble, are found among men of all creeds. The comparison of life to the course of the day supplies, as expressions for its close, the shades of evening, the setting of our sun, the coming of the night. These allusions may be pathetic, but are not necessarily comforting.

The following are some of the many poetic renderings:—
That golden key

That opes the palace of Eternity.

Sinless, stirless rest

That change which never changes

And beauty immortal awakes from the tomb.

Gone before

To that unknown and silent shore;

Shall we not meet as heretofore

Some summer morning?

Passing through nature to eternity. (Shakespeare.)

A death-like sleep,

A gentle wafting to immortal life. (Milton.)

To live in hearts we leave behind

Is not to die. (Campbell.)

Keats, in the Nightingale Ode, has an ecstatic stanza on Death :

Darkling I listen; and for many a time,

I have been half in love with easeful Death,
Call'd him soft names in many a musèd rhyme,
To take into the air my quiet breath;

Now more than ever seems it rich to die.

This errs on the side of extravagance. People cannot dis

POPE'S DYING CHRISTIAN'.

225

pose of death so lightly as to be reconciled by a nightingale's note, even poetically heightened by the imagery of a beautiful Ode.

The unsuitability of Pope's style to Pathos is shown in his Dying Christian'. A series of pointed epigrams is employed to contrast sharply the fading of the present life and the dawning of another; an impossible feat in reality, and scarcely congenial to our imagination.

The more

typical end of the Christian's life is ecstatic joy and hope, which is susceptible of being fully represented in that shape; without the bold and unworkable fiction of having a foot in each world.

The idea of relief from trouble is strongly expressed by Longfellow in 'Evangeline':

Still stands the forest primeval; but far away from its shadow,
Side by side, in their nameless graves, the lovers are sleeping.

Daily the tides of life go ebbing and flowing beside them;
Thousands of throbbing hearts, where theirs are at rest and for ever ;
Thousands of aching brains, where theirs no longer are busy ;
Thousands of toiling hands, where theirs have ceased from their
labours;

Thousands of weary feet, where theirs have completed their journey.

THE HORRIBLE IN EXCESS.

This is the lurking danger in all the compositions of Pathos, and may be made the subject of a general review, though it has already received illustration under the special heads.

It is not to one, but to many scenes in Greek Tragedy that we may apply the epithet heart-rending'. The poetic adornment is scarcely enough to retrieve the horrors; we must, at last, resort to the device for shaking off the incubus of a horrible dream, -wake up and find it all imaginary. With the Greeks, the delight in malignancy, otherwise named the fascination of suffering, was less modified by humane sympathies than with the moderns.

Southey's Mary the Maid of the Inn' is unredeemed horror. By her lover's crimes she was driven to the state described in the first stanza :

Who is yonder poor maniac, whose wildly-fix'd eyes
Seem a heart overcharged to express?

She weeps not, yet often and deeply she sighs:
She never complains-but her silence implies
The composure of settled distress.

It

Keats's Isabella,' a horrible story from Boccaccio, is barely redeemed by the beautiful affection of Isabella. is, however, one of those cases of love tragedy that allow of an exaggerated picture of affection without seeming oversentimental. At the same time, we demand a very highlywrought ideal, in order to compensate for the misery of the termination.

Such incidents happen in real life. The narration of them, unless redeemed by extraordinary genius in the treatment, transgresses the legitimate bounds that divide pathos from horror.

Tennyson's 'Coming of Arthur' is prefaced by a delineation of the previous condition of the kingdom. For the redemption of the horrors, the narrative of Arthur's beneficent improvements is barely sufficient:

And thus the land of Cameliard was waste,
Thick with wet woods, and many a beast therein,
And none or few to scare or chase the beast;
So that wild dog, and wolf and boar and bear
Came night and day, and rooted in the fields,
And wallow'd in the gardens of the King.
And ever and anon the wolf would steal
The children and devour, but now and then,
Her own brood lost or dead, lent her fierce teat
To human sucklings; and the children, housed
In her foul den, there at their meat would growl,
And mock their foster-mother on four feet,
Till, straighten'd, they grew up to wolf-like men,
Worse than the wolves.

STRENGTH FOR PATHOS.

When a pathetic effect is aimed at, care must be taken that Strength is not substituted for it.

This may happen in several ways. For example, sorrow may be expressed in the passionate forms of anger or hatred, which produce the effects of Strength instead of Tender Feeling. Or a scene intended to be pathetic may have its grander aspects enlarged upon, so that the impression of these may be what chiefly remains. Or, again, the conduct of a sufferer may be so painted that we rather admire his moral elevation than sympathize with his sufferings.

It is a matter of fact that our greatest geniuses are more successful in Strength than in Feeling. This is shown in setting forth the higher degrees of the love emotion; the

SHAKESPEARE'S PATHOS RUNNING INTO STRENGTH. 227

figures chosen being figures of intensity that satisfy the intellect without touching the heart. The remark applies in a pre-eminent degree to Shakespeare. His love hyperboles are calculated purely for intensity of degree; they are apt to be incompatible with tender feeling. When Cleopatra says of Antony, His face was as the heavens,' she makes us look upon him with admiration and astonishment, and on herself as worked up to a pitch of frenzy, but neither effect is of the nature of love.

Macbeth's splendid outburst of dubitation before the murder, has touches of the highest pathos; yet with lapses into imagery of pure strength, which only the genius of the pathetic figures can render otherwise than discordant :—

Besides, this Duncan

Hath borne his faculties so meek, hath been
So clear in his great office, that his virtues
Will plead like angels, trumpet-tongu'd, against
The deep damnation of his taking-off;

And pity, like a naked new-born babe,

Striding the blast, or heaven's cherubin, hors'd
Upon the sightless couriers of the air,
Shall blow the horrid deed in every eye,
That tears shall drown the wind.

The first lines anticipate a burst of moral indignation for the criminality of the deed; the amiability and nobleness of Duncan being tributary to the effect. It is a pure stroke of Shakespearean strength. The pathos lies in the second part, which begins with a touching figure of tenderness, a naked new-born babe'; but the adjunct, striding the blast,' does not carry out the figure, but invests the helpless object with an unnatural exercise of power. The same applies to 'heaven's cherubin,' which are objects of the child-like type, but with a certain maturity qualifying them for active functions; so that they are not improperly horsed on the couriers of the air. Yet the energy of the concluding lines is too much for a tender personation.

PROMISCUOUS PASSAGES.

Few pieces will show better on a minute examination, or prove more illustrative, than Coleridge's poem called 'Love'.

All thoughts, all passions, all delights,
Whatever stirs this mortal frame,

All are but ministers of Love,

And feed his sacred flame.

The

Intensity of expression; yet the two first lines have little of the
love harmony in them: thoughts' least, 'delights' most.
next lines are in full keeping :-

Oft in my waking dreams do I
Live o'er again that happy hour,
When midway on the mount I lay,
Beside the ruin'd tower.

The moonshine, stealing o'er the scene,
Had blended with the lights of eve;
And she was there, my hope, my joy,

My own dear Genevieve!

The whole situation is delicately and suitably chosen for romance; —‘the ruin'd tower'; 'the moonshine blended with the lights of eve'; while both circumstances are maintained in our view by brief allusions in the succeeding stanzas. The two concluding lines are simplicity itself, yet, the words being chosen at once for emotional keeping and for melody, they are all that we can wish. She lean'd against the armed man, The statue of the armed knight; She stood and listened to my lay, Amid the lingering light.

The position is expressive and readily conceived. We are to have a tale of a bold and lovely knight; and the statue is a material support to fancy. The lingering light' continues the previous

allusion.

Few sorrows hath she of her own,
My hope, my joy, my Genevieve!
She loves me best whene'er I sing

The songs that make her grieve.

A matter of fact converted into rich pathos. The poet's invention has brought forth a choice delicacy of love sentiment; such happy strokes are the surest antidote to maudlin. It is an actual truth that the fresh unworn mind can bear with the depths of grief, without passing the limit where pity turns to pain.

I played a soft and doleful air,

I sang an old and moving story—
An old rude song, that suited well
That ruin wild and hoary.

The pathetic and the antique here support each other, as it is their nature to do. All the terms are choice, and breathe the odour of tenderness.

She listened with a fitting blush,

With downcast eyes and modest grace;

For well she knew, I could not choose
But gaze upon her face.

The point of this is the delicate innuendo of self-consciousness on