IRature IRotes : 
^Tbe Selbovne Society’s flDaoasine. 
No. 53 
MAY, 1894. 
VoL. V. 
A NOTE UPON MR. BRIDGES. 
HIS poet of some twenty volumes, many printed at a 
private press, and almost all a little shy and recluse 
and diffident in the circumstances of their issue, is 
beginning to find the favour which he has long evaded. 
Artful dramatist and sonnetteer, he is still best known by one 
little volume of lyrics, divided into four books, and entitled 
“ Shorter Poems,”* and upon the natural felicity of this I wish 
to dwell, not considering even the fifth book lately added. 
The peculiar charm of these lyrics to a lover of nature is 
not easy to define, though impossible not to feel. Here are not 
the miraculous eye and ear of Tennyson, nor the profound philo- 
sophic communing of Wordsworth, nor Arnold’s Greek grace 
and fresh simplicity, nor the more violent raptures of Shelley, 
Byron, Mr. Swinburne, nor yet the deep deliciousness of Keats, 
the haunting dreaminess of Coleridge ; still less are there 
the various manners and temperaments of the last century 
poets, Thomson or Cowper. That century can, indeed, show a 
little group of poets, not unlike this modern ; the genius of 
Collins, the elegancies of the Wartons and of Bowles, which 
half look back upon Milton and the Elizabethans, half look 
forward to Wordsworth and the Victorians, have something in 
common with the spirit of these poems. But the especial charm 
seems to lie in their delicacy towards nature, in a kind of 
courtesy and worshipful adoration. This poet loves to note the 
airy, the less flaunting or obvious, of her beauties ; as his 
metrical and musical skill takes us back to Milton and the 
Elizabethan lyrists, so too does his spiritual posture of mind. 
* The Shorter Poems of Robert Bridges. George Bell & Sons ; 8vo, pp. 
91 ; price 4s. 6d. 
