A NOTE UPON MR. BRIDGES. 
85 
effect of the whole, do not come by chance. And so, if he tells 
us of the first appearance of spring in the hedgerows, with 
delicate phrases and cadences, we feel that the sight of them, 
and the consequent train of emotion, were as impressive to him, 
as charged with significance, as a passage from Sophocles or 
Virgil, or a strain of solemn music. Too many poets give us 
either vague generalities about nature, the “ blue sky ” or the 
“ loud wind,” as though all blue skies and loud winds were alike : 
or they, in Wordsworth’s phrase, “ take an inventory of nature’s 
charms,” and omit nothing. Mr. Bridges has a happier way. 
Take this picture of a belated spring. 
Wanton with long delay the gay spring leaping cometh ; 
'I'he blackthorn starreth now his bough on the eve of May. 
All day in the sweet box-tree the bee for pleasure hummeth : 
The cuckoo sends afloat his note on the air all day. 
“ How dewy nights again and rain in gentle shower 
At root of tree and flower have quenched the winter’s drouth. 
On high the hot sun siuiles, and banks of cloud uptower 
In bulging heads that crowd for miles the dazzling south.” 
The accents that I have ventured to use are meant to draw 
attention to Mr. Bridges’ artful intricacy of interlinked and re- 
peated rhymes. That little poem in its buoyant, leaping measure, 
admirabl}^ sets before us the happy coming of spring, in a few 
dexterous lines : but no hasty versifier could have done it. Or 
take this first stanza from a poem upon “ The Downs.” 
“ O bold majestic downs, smooth, fair and lonely ; 
O still solitude, only matched in the skies : 
Perilous in steep places, 
Soft in the level races, 
Where sweeping in phantom silence the cloudland flies ; 
With lovely undulation of fall and rise ; 
Entrenched with thickets thorned. 
By delicate miniature dainty flowers adorned!” 
There, from the vast spaces of earth and sky, to the tiny 
flowers nestling in the “thickets thorned” is the very likeness 
of the thing itself, without vagueness, without servility. 
A bright purity of air is in these poems, a white and cleanly 
spirit ; old words, “ buxom, blithe, and debonair,” as in Milton’s 
line, recur to us in reading them. They take us into an Arcadia, 
into Hesperides, which are not artificially pastoral and innocent, 
but living realities. Here are no opiate dreams of enchanted 
places, languorous and somnolent and morbid, full of heavy 
spice odours and the other properties of narcotic poets. Here 
are the reaches of the Thames, the English downs, the homeli- 
ness of English gardens, orchards, fields and copses. Upon 
these, Mr. Bridges dwells with contented joy, finding in them all 
the magic and the beauty that the muses need. These furnish 
him with thoughts grave and ardent, fancies happy and gay; 
these, and the riches of the high and ancient arts. It is a 
winning poetry, that grows upon us, and steals into our memo- 
