318 THE ROYAL SOCIETY OF CANADA 



in the "Adonais" where Shelley uses the mysterious Urania as a 

 viaduct for his own super-subtle metaphysics. 



It is perhaps idle to speculate on the relative merit of our greatest 

 English elegies. We name them "Lycidas," "Adonais," "Thyrsis" 

 and "In Memoriam" and each without question or blame attaching 

 to our choice may have its own votaries. It is of course with the two 

 earlier and with their ancient prototypes that the "Thyrsis" must 

 be compared; but it is now chiefly with the differentiating qualities 

 that I propose to deal. I suppose that critical opinion on the whole 

 sets the "Lycidas" highest in the scale with "Adonais" and "Thyrsis" 

 following in order of time and of merit. Personally I always like 

 best the one that I have read last, and this is not improbably the 

 common experience. 



An obvious distinction is to be made at the outset; King and 

 Keats were not mourned as friends by Milton or by Shelley. In 

 neither poem is found the note of intimacy. What rather inspired 

 the threnody was in each case some sympathy for the lot of one whom 

 death had made frustrate of high hopes, and Shelley is moved by 

 the added passionate impulse of one "who in another's fate now 

 wept his own." Clough on the other hand was as close a friend as 

 Arnold ever permitted himself to have, and given the circumstances 

 we might have expected such intensity of personal grief as we discover 

 in the more impassioned lyrics that Tennyson devoted to Hallam's 

 memory. But we have on the contrary only an idealized though 

 exquisitely phrased regret: 



Nothing is here for tears, nothing to wail, 

 Or knock the breast. 

 The sturdy Johnson accuses Milton of elegant trifling in so far as he 

 accommodated his lament for King to the traditional pastoral setting 

 which classical authority has prescribed for such a theme. "Passion 

 plucks no berries from the myrtle and ivy, nor calls upon Arethuse 

 and Mincius, nor tells of rough satyrs and fauns with cloven heel. 

 Where there is leisure for fiction there is little grief." The truth is 

 rather that sorrow demands some mitigating veil if it is to furnish 

 forth the subject matter for a sustained song. A poet may indulge 

 the abandonment of despair and its converse the ecstasy of hope 

 only in brief lyric snatches, or in the tense dramatic moments of 

 tragedy. How few upon reflection are the moments of devastating 

 sorrow in the "In Memoriam" group of lyrics, and one must search 

 diligently in literature to find a sustained expression of grief wherein 

 art has not contrived some alleviating device. Hugo in "Les Con- 

 templations" has more nearly than any other achieved this miracle 

 of directness throughout a whole group of memorial verses, yet we 



