Address on Literature and Arts. 131 



" The Light of Asia " was a great success, as it deserved 

 to be. The riclyiess and sublimity of Oriental poetry, 

 without its vagueness and diffuseness, were there embodied 

 in verse tliat was perfect of its kind, that was to Tennyson's 

 as the floating grace of Aphrodite to the imperial tread of 

 Pallas. It was, in the words of an almost forgotten poet, 

 " a poem round and perfect as a star." There were even 

 people to whom it came as a new gospel, and Buddhism 

 became the cult of some Bostonian enthusiasts. 



But the "Song of Songs" and "Pearls of the Faith" are 

 far below it. They are fragmentary, without sustained 

 interest, they are cabinets of "specimens," or albums of 

 " beauties," they bristle with unpronounceable names, and 

 recondite allusions ; they do not read as if the thought 

 of a far-off age and country had been passed through the 

 crucible of a poetic mind aglow with inspiration. The 

 fascination of their forerunner drew you on and on, till, 

 when you reached the end, you wished the poem longer ; 

 you must be a proselyte indeed if these charm in like 

 manner. It would seem that Sir Edwin must keep touch 

 with Eastern fancy and imagery, or he is lost ; for never did 

 a poet who had once achieved a name, blunder into a more 

 melancholy waste of commonplace, a flatter Batavian 

 landscape of prosy rhyme, than he, in the volume with 

 which last year he attempted to vindicate his claim to a 

 l^lace among singers of English song. If, as some have 

 conjectured, it was a bid for the reversion of the laureate- 

 ship, it must have been based on the theory that the office 

 would be disposed of by Dutch auction. There is a fortunate 

 resumption of the Oriental sumptuousness of fancy, now 

 blended with the pathos of sorrowing love, in the just- 

 published "In My Lady's Praise," an acrostic poem which 

 takes up successively the precious stones whose initial 

 letters spell the name of his dead wife. 



It has been the misfortune of more than one of our promi- 

 nent poets to be betrayed by success in one field into failure 

 in another. Tennyson's mastery in development of character 

 and human sympathy led him to tempt the gods in writing 

 acting dramas. Edwin Arnold's success in piloting splendid 

 argosies from the East, a rich storehouse of romance and 

 mystery, entrapped him into producing original ]3oetry out 

 of his own head, which no one had suspected of being so 

 forlornly bare. Lewis Morris achieved popularity, even to 

 the 23rd edition — as he is at pains to inform us — by the art 



K 2 



