A POET OF IMMORTALITY.* some completeness through his other writings,

still more to those who knew him personally. To readers who did not so know him they will probably, fragmentary as they are, be some- what enigmatic, and will give them but an imperfect idea of a rare, and in many ways impressive and important, per- sonality. Yet even they, we think, will be arrested if they take up this volume and read the opening sentences :—

"I believe that we live after earthly death, and that some of those who read these posthumous confidences may be among my .companions in an unseen world I hold that all things thought and felt, as well as all things done, are somehow photo- graphed imperishably upon the universe, and that my whole past will probably lie open to those with whom I have to do."

Who is it that in these days of materialism and agnosticism speaks in these tones of confidence, and that not as an orthodox believer in any revelation, but from outside the

received religions ? Is it a poet or a prophet? The poets have often held such language,—though, on the other hand,

there have always been poets, from Lucretius and Omar Khayyam downwards, of mortality and annihilation. Mr. Myers was certainly a poet. Known already to school and college friends as a man of dazzling literary gifts, and the author of prize poems, perfect as such, yet possessed of some- thing seldom found in prize poems, he made his debut about 3.867 with a poem still remembered and read, "St. Paul."

Some dozen years later he put out another volume, The Renewal of Youth, and other Poems. About the same time he also gave to the world not a few pages of admirable prose, the essays "Classical and Modern" and the monograph on Wordsworth in the series of "English Men of Letters." All these gave him rank among the foremost of his time and

standing, at once as a critic and a creative artist, an abso- lute master of the sound and colour, the corn position and the combination, of words, of the inner, subtler secrets of style. Good as his Wordsworth is all through, there is no passage more true, more humorous, more subtle, than that in which out of Wordsworth's own practice he confutes Words- worth's famous theory, using as an illustration an admirably chosen passage from the "Affliction of Margaret."

And Myers's own practice ? Somewhat rhetorical and re- sonant, declamatory at times, and even jingling, he yet had a rare mastery of the magic and music of words. What could be more delightful in the vein of light and gay than the contrast between the English and the American girl in the "Letter from Newport" ?—

" Through English eyes more calmly soft

Looks from grey deeps the appealing charm ; Reddens on English cheeks more oft The rose of innocent alarm :— Our old-world heart more gravely feels, Has learnt more force, more self-control; For us through sterner music peals The full accord of soul and soul.

But ah! the life, the smile untaught, The floating presence feathery-fair ! The eyes, the aspect that have caught The brilliance of Columbian air ! No oriole through the forest flits

More sheeny-plumed, more gay and free; On no nymph's marble forehead sits

Proudlier a glad virginity."

What more impressive and penetrating in the grave style than this ?—

" Or one from Plato's page uplifts his head,

Dazed in that mastering parley of the dead ; Till at dark curfew thro' the latticed gloom What presence feels he in his lonely room,

Where mid the writ words of the wise he stands

Like a strange ghost in many-peopled lands ; Or, issuing in some columned cloister, sees Thro' the barred squares the moon-enchanted trees ; Till, when his slow resounding steps have made One silence with their echoes and the shade, How can he tell if for the first time then He paces thus those haunts of musing men ;

• Fragmenta of Prose and Poetry. By Frederic W. H. Myers. Edited by his Wile, Eveleen Myers. With 4 Portraits. London : Longmont; and Co. [es. net. J In the old same footsteps of himself long dead ? "

His prose has the same qualities. Take the contrast of Dante and Mazzini

"With this other exile it was not so. It was in London—the visible type of a universe hastening confusedly to unknown ends and careless of individual pain—that Mazzini must regret that land whose name, even to men born far off, seems to make a part of all soft desire,—the land whose very air and memory invite to unworldly emotion and to passionate repose."

Might not a poet and critic who could compose and analyse thus have been expected to go on giving us ever something better and higher in the realm of letters ? But after 1882 he wrote little literature, hardly any more prose, and practically no more poetry. Those who knew and loved him in his books were wont to lament his silence. He was heard of as engaged in psychical research; as one of a small band who had set themselves to investigate the obscure phenomena of ghosts

and visions. The world for a long time did not take these men seriously. It supposed that they amused their leisure with the hobbies of spiritualism and table-turning, of clair- voyance and mesmerism,—one delusion under many names. Only when it was suddenly announced that Mr. Myers was

dying, and that he had nearly completed a great work on the very subject of that eternal mystery he must so soon be called

on in person to explore, did the world realise how serious it had all been, at least to him ; how he had put his genius into

it, and for it had given up all else.

The admirable sketch by Mr. Arthur Sidgwick, the brother of his great friend, in the Dictionary of National Biography gave, to some extent, the clue to his career. This book gives it more fully, and in Mr. Myers's own words. His father, a well- known divine, a man both of piety and literary skill, the friend of

Jowett and Stanley, Frederick Robertson and Bishop Harvey Goodwin, was incumbent of St. John's, Keswick. There, beneath Skiddaw and beside Derwentwater, in that lovely region with all its charm of Nature and association, Frederic Myers was born and nursed up. His two earliest recollected sensations were, his sorrow, over the sudden death of a "little furry mole" run over by a cart, his joy, when on his sixth birthday he began to read the First Aeneid of Virgil. He was a precocious child and a precocious poet. At Cheltenham, as a boy of fourteen, he wrote some verses which Aubrey de Vere, an experienced judge, pronounced the most remarkable poetry written at that age he had ever seen. A year or two later he won the poetry prize with a piece on the death oi Socrates which many much older authors might have been glad to sign. At seventeen he went to Cambridge, and there repeated on a larger stage his school triumphs.

His early love for Virgil remained a lifelong passion. "I gradually wrote out Bucolics, Georgics, Aeneid from memory: and felt as I have felt ever since, that of all minds known to me it is Virgil's of which I am the most intimate and adoring disciple." Sappho and Pindar made other epochs. From sixteen to twenty-three he was a Hellenist. In 1864 he made a solitary pilgrimage to the East, and amid the "isles of Greece," off the Lesbian shore, discovered the hollowness of Hellenism as an ideal.

From the East he went to the West, travelled in America, and, indifferent whether he lived or died, swam at night across the slack water a little below the gigantic fall of Niagara. He lived, and be became "converted" in the Christian sense and to Christianity. This period was marked by the production of his well-known pieces, full of fire and fervour, on St. Paul and St. John the Baptist. Then again the vision faded. The time, the year 1873, was, as he vividly says, "the time of the first flush of triumphant Darwinism." His friends, W. K.

Clifford, Frederic Harrison, George Eliot before all, were of this faith. Myers could not rest in it. An inspiration mystical, poetic, a wind, a voice, of the spirit, blowing, whispering, he hardly knew whence, summoned him away and spoke of a new creed. Then came the "final faith," as he calls it; the belief that behind the veil of death, yet close to us, and at times penetrating the thin partition, there is a con- tinued and continuous existence, an unending evolution and ascent of the soul to a better and yet better life and energy. The evidence of this creed collected out of the long researches

of his friends and himself he embodied in his great work on Human Personality, and its Survival of Bodily Death. The-

book was too large to be popular or widely read. The facts need constant reverification. A master of language, it may be doubted whether Myers is not at times mastered by it. Truth often, as Renan said, lies in a nuance. But every nuance is not a truth, and Myers was for ever by his poetic manipu- lation of phrase and metaphor creating nuances, rich, incalcu- lably rich, in suggestion, but not absolutely convincing or final. The cumulative evidence for telepathy is great, but the unbeliever can still fairly say that telepathy has not, in the plain meaning of the word, yet been "discovered." Yet Myers's belief, and how he came to it, remains itself a fact, possibly a prerogative fact.

This, then, is the interest of this volume, not that it adds much to either the mass or the fame of Mr. Myers's writings, but that it makes our record more complete, and that it illuminates and rounds off what we possessed before. His Ultimate creed is no contradiction, but rather, as he would have urged, an extension, of Christianity. An unnecessary extension, the convinced Christian will think. Yet it is certainly a noble and ennobling creed. "It bids us to hope," it gazes forward and upward, on and ever on. "I look upon Christ," he writes, "as a Revealer of immortality absolutely unique, as the incomparable Pioneer of all wisdom that shall be learnt concerning unseen things." And he writes in no patronising vein. He is the humblest-minded of men. His only claim is to have been sincere, and sincere he certainly was.

Mrs. Myers, who edits the present book, and to whose rare skill are due the admirable photographic portraits it contains, is conscious of its disconnected and heterogeneous character. She seems to promise at a later day something fuller, more com- plete and orderly. It is much to be hoped that we may have it. What is wanted is a collected edition of the poems, and a full sketch, with more letters and "remains," of this interesting and original life, the phases of whose faith in its earthly pilgrimage are so fine, so individual, so suggestive, so endearing.

THE PILGRIM'S PROGRESS.*