Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, such sentences, we reiterate, are poems where are they? themselves, poems within poems, picThink not of them, thou hast thy music tures within pictures, melodies at once too, and hues by virtue of that ideal world While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying which they summon before us. They day, And touch the stubble plains with rosy hue; Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn Among the river sallows, borne aloft are the quintessence of impressionism. But they are not the finest mould to which impressionism can be fashioned. In Endymion, Lamia, Hyperion, the means outweigh the end. We realize moods, not men; rhapsodies often rather than symphonies; modulation, perspective are lacking. The splendor emotions. It is impressionism severe, is sometimes slovenly. There is a great want of that netteté which art demands. Not so in those two short but great works, the "Pot of Basil," and the "Eve of St. Agnes." "Did our great poets," writes Keats somewhere between 1817 and 1818, "ever write short pieces, I mean in the shape of tales? This same invention seems, indeed, of late years to have been forgotten as a poetic excellence;" and so arose the "short pieces" of "Fair Isabel, poor simple Isabel," and of "Porphyro and Madeline." Now, in these poems there is not only wealth of suggestion but clearness of outline, and the gentlest harmony of motives with emotions. Moreover, in the "Pot of Basil" the impressionism of the language heightens with the climax of the story So the two brothers and their murder'd man Rode past fair Florence to where Arno's stream Gurgles through straighten'd banks, and still doth fan simple, majestic. It is impossible to dissect this "simple plaining of a minstrel's song;" its beauties permeate the whole. How grand is the wail of the murdered lover when addresses Isabel in the vision! he I am a shadow now, alas! alas! ing Alone: I chant alone the holy mass: While little sounds of life are round me knelling, And glossy bees at noon do fieldward pass, And many a chapel bell the hour is tell ing, Paining me through: these sounds grow strange to me, And thou art distant in Humanity. How graceful the phrase, "Selfishness, Love's cousin!" How graphic the autumn landscape of stanza thirty-two!— The breath of winter comes from far away, And the sick west continually bereaves Itself with dancing bulrush, and the Or some gold tinge, and plays a roundebream Keeps head against the freshets. Sick and wan The brothers' faces in the ford did seem, Lorenzo's flush with love. They pass'd the water Into a forest quiet for the slaughter. In our judgment this stanza is, of its kind, supreme. What a catastrophe of doom, guilt, and suspense is condensed into the "two brothers and their murder'd man!" How boldly the march of the murderers to their deed is swung upon us by the "Sick and the brothers' faces in the ford did seem!" What a fine touch of contrast is "Lorenzo's flush with love!" With what an awful hush the "forest quiet for the slaughter" invests the crime itself, of which the next stanza merely says wan There was Lorenzo slain and buried in, There in that forest did his great love cease. Everything is restrained and intense; yet all is conveyed by suggestion to our lay Of death among the bushes and the leaves. To our thinking, this Gothic impressionism, whose notes are deep, melancholy, and mystic, is worth all the rapturous and gorgeous paraphernalia of and demi-gods Keats's Greek gods massed together. The "Eve of St. Agnes" is as perfect does not in its way, though its way soar so high. The keynote is wonderfully struck at the opening— The owl, for all his feathers, was a-cold and throughout a mediæval organmusic breathes its magic, awakening, as the stops, so to speak, are varied, a thousand thoughts and feelings. We know of nothing quite comparable to it, save Carpaccio's pictures of the legend of St. Ursula. Indeed the Soon trembling in her soft and chilly nest, In sort of wakeful swoon, perplex'd she lay, Until the poppied warmth of sleep op- To what do their minor imitators in press'd Her soothed limbs, and soul fatigued away; Flown, like a thought, until the morrowday; Blissfully haven'd both from joy and pain; Clasp'd like a missal where swart Paynims pray: Blinded alike from sunshine and from rain, As though a rose should shut, and be a bud again cline? Is it that interpretative intensity which signalizes Donne, that dainty perfection which redeems Sterne, that aspiration after ideals which immortalizes Keats? Every one must give the answer which to himself is true. For ourselves, we discriminate a lower range and plane, language and aims less lofty, perceptions less acute. Let our modern impressionists bear in mind that what is vulgarly known as chimes with and recalls, by spiritual "Realism" has indeed nothing necesaffinity, the first of that memorable series. Pregnant, too, with all the force of impressionism is the This is a style utterly dissimilar from the dramatic fury of Byron or Shelley's thrilling unearthliness. And how dissimilar it is from what the reading public of to-day hail as a new schoolthe School of the Impressionists! That great word-colorists should interpret life and nature by mood, by suggestion, by impression, is, as we have seen, an old affair. How do our modern wordcolorists behave? Of Carlyle, of Ruskin, both unconsciously great moral impressionists, we do not speak. But of Pierre Loti and Mr. Rudyard Kipling? None can doubt the ability of either, the very great ability of one. But what use is their ability led to serve? sarily in common with impressionism at all. If impressionism is to be worthy of its ancestry, the impressionist, whether on canvas or on paper, must fix his gaze on something at any rate of the From The New Review. THE BORDER LAW. Leges Marchiarum, to wit, the Laws of the Marches; so statesmen and lawyers named the codes which said, though oft in vain, how English and Scots Marchmen should comport themselves, and how each kingdom should guard against the other's deadly, unrelenting enmity. I propose to outline these laws, and the officials by whom and courts wherein they were enforced. But first a word as to country aad people. From Berwick to the Solwaythe extreme points of the dividing line between North and South Britain-is but seventy miles in a crow's flight; but trace its windings, and you measure one hundred and ten. Over more than half this space the division is arbitrary. It happed where the opposing forces balanced. The Scot pushed his way a little farther south here, and there was pushed back a little further north; and commis sioners and treaties indelibly marked the spots. The conflict lasted over three centuries, and must obviously be fiercest on the line where the kingdoms met. And if it stiffened, yet warped, the Scots character at large, and prevented the growth of commerce and tilth and comfort in Scotland proper, what must have been its effect on the Scottish Borderer, ever in the hottest of the furnace? The weaker, poorer, smaller kingdom felt the struggle far more than England, yet the English were worse troubled than the Scots; being the richer, they were the more liable to incursion; their dalesmen were not greatly different from other Englishmen; they were held in hand by a strong central authority; they had thriving towns and a certain standard of wealth and comfort. Now, the Scots clansmen developed unchecked; so it is mainly from them that we take our ideas of Border life. The Border country is a pleasant pastoral land, with soft, rounded hills and streams innumerable and secluded valleys, where the ruins of old peels or feudal castles denote a troubled past. That past, however, is written nobly over letters, for the Border ballads are of the finest of the wheat. They preserve, as only literature can, the joys and sorrows, the aspirations, hopes and beliefs of other days and vanished lives. They are voices from the darkness; but: fe had himself laid hand on sword He who this rime did write! The most of them have no certain time or place. Even the traditional stories help but little to make things clear. Yet they tell us more, and tell it better than the Annalist ever dreamed. We know who and what these men really were: a strong, resolute race, passionate and proud, rough and cruel, living by open robbery, yet capable of deathless devotion, faithful to their word, hating all cowards and traitors to the death; not without a certain respect and admiration for their likes across the line, fond of jest and song, equal on occasions to a certain rude eloquence, and, before all, the most turbulent and troublesome. The Scots Borderers were dreaded by their own more peaceful countrymen; and to think of that narrow strip of country, hemmed in by the Highlands to the north, and the Border clans on the south, is to shudder at the burden it had to endure. For a race, whatever its good qualities, that lives by rapine, is like to be dangerous to friends as well as foes. Some Border clans, as the Armstrongs and the Elliots, were girded at as "always riding;" and they were not particular as to whom they rode against. Nay; both governments suspected the Borderers of an inexplicable tenderness for their neighbors. When they took part in a larger expedition, they would attack each other with a suspicious lack of heart. At best they were apt to look at war from their own point of view, and fight for mere prisoners or plunder. To meet such conditions the Border laws were evolved. They were administered in chief by special officers called wardens. Either Border was portioned out into three Marches; the East, the Middle, and the West (the lordship of Liddesdale was included in the Scots Middle March, but sometimes it had a special keeper of almost equal dignity with a warden). Each of the three Scots wardens had a hundred pounds of yearly fee; he could appoint deputies, captains of strongholds, clerks, sergeants, and dempsters; he could call out the full force of his district to invade or to beat back invasion; he represented the sovereign, and was responsible for crimes. He must keep the clans in order by securing as hostages several of their most conspicuous sons, and either these were quartered on nobles on the other side of the Firth, or they were held in safer keeping in the kings' castles. He also held justice courts for the trial of Scots subjects accused of offences against the laws of their own country. He was commonly a great noble of the district, his office in early times being often hereditary; and, as such, he had power of life and death, so that the need for holding special courts was little felt. A Scots anecdote the name better than all else. It unblushingly commends Gilnockie's love of honesty, his generosity, his patriotism, and directly accuses his sovereign of treachery, in which accusation there is perhaps some truth. Anyhow, the execution was the act of a weak and violent man, and had no permanent effect. pictures an angry Highlander "ban- churchyard. But the ballad preserves ning" the Lords of Session as "kinless loons," because, though some were relatives, they had decided a case against him. These wardens were not "kinless loons," and they often used their office to favor a friend or depress a foe. On small pretext they put their enemies "to the horn," as the process of outlawry (by trumpet blast) was called. True, the indifference with which those enemies "went to the horn" would scandalize the legal pedant. Sometimes a superior officer, a "lieutenant," was sent to the Borders: the wardens were under him; he more fully represented the royal power. Now and again the sovereign himself made a progress, administering a rough and ready justice, and to "dantoning the thieves of the Borders, and making the rush bush keep the cow." So it was said of James V.'s famous raid in 1529. The chief incident was the capture of Johnie Armstrong, of Gilnockie, the ruins of whose picturesque tower at the Hollows still overlook the Esk. Gilnockie came to meet his king with a great band of horsemen richly apparelled. He was captain of Langholm Castle, and the ballad tells how he and his companions exercised themselves in knightly sports on Langholm Lee, whilst "The ladies lukit frae their loft window." "God bring our men well hame agen!" the ladies said; and their apprehensions were more than justified. "What wants yon knave that a king should have?" asked the king in angry amaze. He ordered the band to instant execution; and in accordance with romantic precedent, one only is said to have escaped to tell the tale. Many of Johnie's name, among them I Will Armstrong, tersely described as "another stark theiff," went to their doom; but the act, however applauded at Edinburgh, was bitterly condemned on the Borders. Gilnockie only plundered the English, it was urged, and the king had caught him by a trick, unworthy a Stuart. The country folk loved to tell how the dule trees faded away, and they loved to point out the graves of the Armstrongs in the lonely The wardens had twofold duties: first, defence against the enemy; second, negotiation in time of peace with the "mighty opposite." Thus the Border Laws were part police and part international, and were administered in different courts. Offences of the first class were speaking or conferring with Englishmen without permission of the king or the warden; and the warning Englishmen of Scots alertness in the matter of forays. In brief, aiding, abetting, or in any way holding intercourse with the "Auld Enemy" was March Treason (to adopt a convenient English term). In England the wardens were finally chosen for their political and military skill, and not because of their territorial position. Now the warden of the East Marches was commonly governor and castellan of Berwick. The Castle of Harbottell was allotted to the warden of the Middle Marche; whilst for the West Carlisle, where again governor and warden were often one, was the appointed place. Sometimes a lord warden general was appointed, sometimes a lieutenant, but the wardens were commonly independent. At the warden courts Englishmen were punished for March Treason, a branch of which was furnishing the Scots with articles of merchandise or war. And here I note that Carlisle throve on this illegal traffic. At Carlisle fair the Carlisle burgher never asked the nationality of man or beast. The first got his money or its equivalent; the second was instantly passed through the hands of butcher and skinner. Though the countryside were wasted, the burghers lay safe within their strong walls, and waxed fat on the spoils of Borderer and Dalesman alike. Small wonder the city |