Iliad: he fires another Troy; but not as the blind old bard of Scio's rocky isle, musing long till the fire burned within him, and at last he spake with his tongue. He is not a prophet himself, but one of the young men of the sons of the prophets, who, bred up in a school of inspiration, catches some of the true prophetic fire, and, for the time being, rises to the level of one of the minor prophets. But let no one, therefore, despise a prize poem because it is written to order, and therefore does not satisfy the conditions for the production of poetry of the first rank. A prize poem will, at least, draw out some, if not all, the qualities of a poet. The young poet must try his new-fledged wings by flights like these; and the defects of the true poet have been as serviceable to him as his successes. More so, even, for they have driven him back upon himself. The agony of disappointment has wrung from him thoughts and moods of feeling which success never could. If they speak best who breathe their words in pain, so competition may call out a poet's powers. True, that, whether crowned or uncrowned by the judges, he is the poet still; but he need not lose heart because he does not catch the ear of his judges the first, the second, or even the third time. There may be a fault on their part, probably there is; probably they fall in with some prevailing taste, and the true poet is too true to himself to imitate the fashion of the age which passeth away. But, probably, there is also a fault in the young poet himself. He has strength without sweetness, force without ease; he has powers which want compression; he must master his own fancies, and prune his too luxuriant language. All this he can only learn under defeat. Failure has made poets, and success has marred others. The author of "Festus," the author of "King Arthur," the author of "Proverbial Philosophy,' are instances of how success may mar a poet. The poet of a school or a clique who applaud him beforehand, and whose praise he bargains for as managers for professional claqueurs, will soon cease to be a poet at all. He will write for his côterie, till at last even his côterie get tired of him. The foregoing remarks were not so much called out by Mr. Alexander's particular case, as suggested by the

subject of prize poems in general. We do not know if they apply to him at all; whether he has learned a lesson from previous failure as well as from present success, we cannot say; but we doubt not he is nursing his powers, by these improvisatore displays, for some poem in which the choice of subject and treatment shall be all his own, and on which he may inscribe his name, as Phidias on the shield of Minerva. With great good taste, Mr. Alexander has not attempted the "Iliad" in a nutshell, an epic of two hundred verses. For the judges to read it, a prize poem must be short; it must suggest thought, and not exhaust it; we must lay it down with the remark, "Here we have a poet," not "Here we have a poem." Mr. Alexander has met the conditions required, by throwing his piece into the shape of a dream. Drifting down the Euphrates, we resign ourselves to the reflections that naturally arise, as that famous and ancient river glides down at its own sweet will, bearing us along with it. Temples and towers, gates of brass, and hanging gardens, swim before us. Whether they are still and we in motion, or whether they are gliding down the river and we are watching the pageant float before us, is very indistinctly traced; but it is through this indistinctness that we are not shocked at anachronisms, and are charmed out of all sense of the unities. From Nimrod, the first mighty hunter of men, to Alexander, the last who ruled by proud Euphrates stream, near two thousand years their cloudy wings expand, and, swathed in a mist of memories rise before us, as the ghosts of murdered kings rise before Richard in his tent at Bosworth.

We are near awaking, it is said, when we dream that we dream. So this dream of Euphrates is so dreamlike, that we feel it is only a dream. It is no attempt to rehabitate the past. There is nothing dramatic, much less that waxwork imitation of life which is the weak attempt of undramatic poets to pass off their thoughts for things. It is a reverie throughout. By not attempting too much, Mr. Alexander has escaped the fault of aspiring poets. He speaks to the eye only, not to the eye and ear. His pictures have a soft shimmer, like that of moonlight on the river; the colours are in shadow, not brought out

In

as in sunlight; it is not a Crystal Palace show of Assyrian antiquities, in which nothing is left to the imagination; but rather that of the museum, in which the faded look of the relic fits in with our idea of the past. Antiquity must be dim. What can we know of Assyrian kings? They are a mystery to us, like their winged bulls and arrow-headed cipher. If Melrose, a ruin of yesterday, or the Coliseum, a ruin of a thousand years only, should be visited by moonlight, how much more Babylon, whose bricks are now dust heaps, and whose monuments mounds of rubbish? one language only is their history deciphered. Like the sin of Judah, written with a pen of iron and with the point of a diamond, the doom of Babylon is predicted in a record that has outlived the site of the city itself. The subject suits a sacred poem, for secular interest in Babylon there is none. Palmyra is not more buried, or the Greek kingdom of Bactria more uninteresting, except for the enduring interest which the songs of Sion have thrown around the waters of Babylon. These Judean exiles have done for her what all her kings, astrologers, soothsayers, and wise men never could do-invest her annals with interest to us. These willows on which they hanged their harps, still are green, though all is barren beside. The plaintive melody in which they refused to sing the Lord's song in a strange land, is one touch of nature amid the monotony of pomp and splendour. States fall, arts fade, but nature and truth do not die. So it is to an exile band that Babylon owes the fact that it is not obliterated out of remembrance. In the Jews' language we decipher the history of Kings that we cannot reach in their

own.

The poem opens with a soft and dreamlike description of the river by moonlight, with its proud galleys with oars sweeping down the stream, osier barges wine-laden dropping down the current, while the pale moon gleams over turret and tower, palace and garden, rising on either bank.

Then follow two pictures, charming for their contrast: the one of the proud conquerors, the king and court of

A bright chord of the fourfold river-lyre.⋆
And it had old-world songs of Abraham;
And him of Rehoboth, who went to rule
Among the dark-eyed dukes on Seir's red
rocks."

The river next whispers the legend of the journey of the ten tribes across the Euphrates to Arsareth, that distant land twice nine long months' journey distant from the river, where the Benei Yisrael are settled to this day:

"And all their life is sacrament and psalm, Vesper, or festival, or holy deed.

There they do dwell until the latter time, When God Most High shall stay the springs again."

But now the waters change their meaning. The exiles of Zion stand by the river's edge, and sing that saddest dirge, the super fumina, which has been, we think, the key-note to that most touching prayer in our. Litany, "That it may please thee to show thy pity upon all prisoners and captives:"

"How shall they sing God's song in the strange land?

For it is native of the temple, laid,
Like a white flower, on Moriah's breast;
And it is not for Asia's sealike plain,
But for the shadows of the purple hills:
Not for the broad and even-pulsing stream,
But for the land, which Jordan passioneth

His poetry of waterfalls, night and day
Anger'd by cataracts, lulled by nightin-
gales,
Wreath'd with white foam, and triumph-
ing for ever,

That is to the Euphrates, as a saint
Before his coronation, with his soul
Full of sweet yearnings and of tears divine,
Is to some cold and passionless idol god
Imprisoned in his rigid marble lines."

The sublime act of Seraiah is next pourtrayed. The judgments against Babylon, which Jeremiah the prophet had written in a book, are hurled, with a stone bound to the roll, into the midst of Euphrates. "And thou shall say, Thus shall Babylon sink, and shall not rise from the evil that I will bring upon her. Thus far are the words of Jeremiah." It is difficult to find a parallel to this sublime act of symbolic judgment. As sublime is the New Testament echo of the same act of judicial warning :"And a mighty angel took up a stone like a great millstone, and cast it into the sea, saying, Thus with violence shall that great city, Babylon, be thrown down, and shall be found no more at all."-Rev. xviii. 21.

Long may our old Hebrew Bible be read and reverenced among us. Here is the true spring-head of all poetic fire and feeling. Here heroism and love of country rise to a higher level than in the proudest periods of Greece and Rome, for the spring that fed them was higher still. Men with the fear of God in their hearts were patriots in a purer sense of the word than Aristides and Brutus could have aspired to. To the Hebrew Scriptures, then, the poet, who would fill his mind with lofty and sublime conceptions, should repair. Milton, the great master of sublimity in the English language, drew his inspiration direct from this source. These memorable words of his, "He that would not be frustrate of his hope to write well hereafter in laudable things, ought himself to be a true poem," lets us into the secret place of thunder, into the source of all his lofty imaginings! He had not only read those Hebrew Scriptures, but sought to shape his thoughts and inmost being by them, and therefore when he moved in numbers it was in that majestic godlike gait that he had caught from the oracles of God. The Carews, Sucklings, and Cowleys could no more aspire to this than a gorilla

VOL. LVI.-NO. CCCXXXIV.

can ape a Newton. Such thoughts are not engendered in the intellect, of the inner soul, the life breathing out much less in the fancy; they are part on the lips. This is why it is only a religious man who can write a religious poem; "that is," again to use Milton's words, "a composition and pattern of the best and honourablest things. Not presuming to sing high praises of heroic men or famous cities, unless he have in himself the experience and the practice of all that which is praiseworthy."

We have only space for the last few lines. After that, Alexander's barge has swept down the river with death "whitelipped, and grim, and stern," keeping his court upon the deck beside the sick king, and mocking his pomp; as the river flows on silently to the ocean, with its mingled memories of battles and psalms, the Benedicite of the three children, the banquet of Belshazzar; as the vision of the last of the three great monarchies, that ruled by the banks of Euphrates, is fading away, another vision of another river in the land that is very far off rises before us, and the poem dies out in echoes like these:

"And his full music took a finer tone,

And sang me something of a "gentler stream,"

"

That rolls for ever to another shore, Whereof our God himself is the sole sea, And Christ's dear love the pulsing of the tide,

And his sweet spirit is the breathing wind. Something it chaunted too of exiled men On the sad bank of that strange river, Life, Hanging the harp of their deep heart-de

sires

To rest upon the willow of the cross,
And longing for the everlasting hills,
Mount Sion and Jerusalem of God.
And then I thought I knelt, and kneeling
heard

Nothing-save only the long wash of waves, And one sweet psalm that sobb'd for evermore."

We are not professional critics, and do not keep graduated scales to measure poetic merit. A rain-gauge, a gas-meter, a wet-bulb are all cunning tests to catch the slippery ariels that hover around us in one elemental form or other. But poetry is so much a matter of feeling, it affects us, we cannot tell why, and so much must be allowed for strange partialities and strange antipathies, that we always give our judgment with fear and

29

trembling in these matters. We can only say, then, that in our poor judgment, a more true and touching lament by the river of time has never been sounded than this. Most musical, most melancholy, it is such a dirge as the desolate river god would chaunt over his deserted palaces, now full of doleful creatures, where the owls screech and the satyrs dance, where no Arab pitches his tent, where no shepherd folds his flock. This is the burden of Babylon, which the traveller may see that visits the banks of the Euphrates, and which the poet, with the vision and faculty divine of conjuring up distant scenes and past events, has brought before us in stately blank verse, the cadence of which is sweet as the river's ripple.

MEER ALI MOORAD* is one of those eastern potentates whose territories have been "annexed," rightfully or wrongfully, by the East India Company. He was the youngest son of Meer Sohrab, Sovereign of Upper Sindh, a valuable province lying on both sides of the River Indus. On the death of his father his eldest brother, Meer Roostum Khan, succeeded to the sovereignty of Upper Sindh, and in conjunction with his second brother, stripped Ali Moorad of his patrimonial possessions. Disputes soon arose between the brothers and their respective adherents, which led to the interposition of the British political agent, which availed but for a time. Several battles ensued between the brothers, who at last formally settled their differences and entered into the treaty of Nownahar, solemnly inscribed on a blank leaf of a copy of the Koran, by which the right of Meer Ali to certain districts was duly acknowledged. Meer Roostum having attained the age of eighty-five years, and finding himself unequal to the control of Sindh, where disturbances had arisen, resigned in favour of Ali Moorad, upon whom the succession devolved, under his father's will. His accession to the sovereignty of Upper Sindh was recognised by the British Government, who accepted support from him on the occasion of

As a

hostilities between them and the Hyderabad Ameers, when Meer Ali, with 5,000 horse, kept open Sir Charles Napier's communications with Sukker, and held in check some hostile tribes. Sir Charles reported that the conduct of Meer Ali was "loyal from first to last both to his family and to the British Government;" and the Governor-General, the Earl of Ellenborough, in a despatch dated 23rd August, 1843, stated that "Ali Moorad had been a faithful ally, when his sudden and unexpected enmity might have been fatal to our army.' reward for his services, Sir Charles Napier presented Ali Moorad with the before-mentioned districts of Meerpore, Matihla, and Meherkee, which had been seized by the British. A treaty between him and the British Government was transmitted by Sir Charles Napier to the Indian Government, in 1845, but its formal ratification never took place. In 1850, up to which time Ali Moorad had been treated as an independent sovereign and ally, the Governor-General of India, accompanied by the Chief Commissioner of Sindh, paid him a visit of state. Captain Langley states that the Commissioner was at the very time preparing a charge against Meer Ali, of having fraudulently substituted in the treaty of Nownahar words which gave him the districts of Meerpore, Matihla, and Meherkee, granted to him by Sir Charles Napier. On the evidence of several perjured witnesses the Meer was convicted, and the Marquis of Dalhousie stripped him, not only of these districts, but also of some other possessions, thereby "annexing" territory to the value of £80,000 a-year. The chief accuser, Shaikh Ali Husseyn, subsequently confessed his perjury against Meer Ali, who having applied repeatedly, but in vain, to the Indian Government for redress, at last proceeded to London in search of justice. Here he met with every opposition, the Board of Directors declining even to sanction his reception at Court. While in London news arrived of the Indian mutiny, whereupon the Meer, although suffering from injustice and indigni