Set in thick tufts along the bushy marge
    With big bright eyes of gold;
    And glorious water-plants, like fans, unfold
  Their blossoms strange and large.

  That wandering boy, young Hylas, did not find
    Beauties so rich and rare,
    Where swallow-wort and pale-bright maiden’s hair
  And dog-grass richly twined.

  A sloping bank ran round it like a crown,
    Whereon a purple cloud
    Of dark wild hyacinths, a fairy crowd,
  Had settled softly down.

  And dreamy sounds of never-ending bells
    From Oxford’s holy towers
    Came down the stream, and went among the flowers,
  And died in little swells_.

These two extracts give a fair notion of the Tractarian poetry, with its purity, its idealism, its love of Nature and its unreal conception of life, Faber also wrote an England’s Trust, before Lord John Manners published his; and in this he rejoices in the passing away of all the old sensual confidence, and in the coming of a new age of humility and spirituality.  Alas! it never came!  There was a roll in the wave of thought, a few beautiful shells were thrown up on the shore of literature, and then the little eddy of Tractarianism was broken and spent, and lost in the general progress of mankind.  We touch with reverend pity the volumes without which we should scarcely know that Young England had ever existed, and we refuse to believe that all the enthusiasm and piety and courage of which they are the mere ashes have wholly passed away.  They have become spread over a wide expanse of effort, and no one knows who has been graciously affected by them.  Who shall say that some distant echo of the Cherwell harp was not sounding in the heart of Gordon when he went to his African martyrdom?  It is her adventurers, whether of the pen or of the sword, that have made England what she is.  But if every adventurer succeeded, where would the adventure be?

The Duke of Rutland soon repeated his first little heroic expedition into the land of verses.  He published a volume of English Ballads; but this has not the historical interest which makes England’s Trust a curiosity.  He has written about Church Rates, and the Colonies, and the Importance of Literature to Men of Business, but never again of his reveries in Neville’s Court nor of his determination to emulate the virtues of King Charles the Martyr.  No matter!  If all our hereditary legislators were as high-minded and single-hearted as the new Duke of Rutland, the reform of the House of Lords would scarcely be a burning question.

IONICA

IONICA. Smith Elder & Co., 65, Cornhill. 1858.