descriptive school does in poetry. Thompson, for instance, described the scenery and country life of the seasons with an accurate and loving eye; but his descriptions are dangerously like catalogues, and his pictures are conventional and cold. The similarity in treatment of landscape which is thus noticeable in poet and painter at their lowest level is not less marked when they are at their best. No greater contrast could be imagined than that between Thompson's method of representing a landscape and Wordsworth's. There are, it is true, passages in Wordsworth's poems where his descriptions of scenery are more minute and circumstantial than anything of Thompson's. He would stop sometimes to do a little land-surveying, and he has embodied the results which he thus obtained on one occasion in a poem entitled "The Thorn."

But very

"Not five yards from the mountain path,
This thorn you on your left espy;
And to the left, three yards beyond,
You see a little muddy pond
Of water, never dry;

I've measured it from side to side,
'Tis three feet long and two feet wide.
And close beside this aged thorn
There is a fresh and lovely sight,
A beauteous heap, a hill of moss,
Just half a foot in height."

different is Wordsworth's method when he is at his best He does not then attempt to describe the various and obvious features of the spot; he gives us instead the spirit of it; he sees at once to its heart. It is indeed his power of doing this that makes him worthy to rank with the great poets of all ages. For it is to be observed that what he describes is just as true as are the points which the inferior artist would notice. The ordinary man when the sun rises will see only a round disc of fire somewhat like a guinea. But the poet-painter Blake saw more than this, yet not less truly; for he pierced through the sensible form to the spiritual meaning, and detected in the radiant sky "an innumerable company of the heavenly host, crying, Holy, Holy, Holy, is the Lord God Almighty!" He questioned not his corporeal eye any more than he would question a window concerning a sight. He looked through it and not with it. Mr. Ruskin drew attention to this distinction in the last course of lectures he delivered at Oxford. The food of Art, he said, is in the ocular and passionate love of nature, not, as some would have it, in the telescopic and dispassionate examination of her. The true artist -be he painter or poet--if he wishes to draw a vivisect him, but looks at him and loves him. It is in seizing the real spirit of what he is describing, in seeing what all may see when

dog, does not

he unfolds it to them, and in clothing the beautiful vision in the beautiful form of indirect yet adequate expression, that the method and genius of the poet consist. No elaborate description, no accurate statement, could bring before us those wonderful Yew Trees in Borrowdale, with half the force and truth and beauty which Wordsworth compresses in the few lines where he speaks of the Fraternal Four,

"beneath whose sable roof

Of boughs, as if for festal purpose, decked

With unrejoicing berries-ghostly shapes

May meet at noontide; Fear and trembling Hope,
Silence and Foresight; Death and Skeleton,
And Time the shadow;-there to celebrate,
And in a natural temple scattered o'er
With altars undisturbed of mossy stone,
United worship; or in mute repose

To lie, and listen to the mountain flood
Murmuring from Glaramara's inmost caves."

There is no closer mark of the affinity between poetry and painting than the fact that the painter's highest level of landscape obeys precisely the same law, and uses the same gifts as we have pointed out to be the poet's. For what is it that makes Turner's landscapes so incomparably superior to those of ordinary painters? It is not that he is inaccurate or careless of details; Mr. Ruskin has sufficiently established his fidelity to nature. It is not that he chose peculiar scenes and aspects; for the commonest things and places were touched with the magic of his brush as well as the fairest. But it is just what it was in the case of Wordsworth-the possession of the imaginative eye, which sees all that other men see, but adds to it what is more true and real, because higher and more lovely

"the gleam,

The light that never was on land or sea,
The consecration and the poet's dream."

This same quality can be seen to be necessary alike to the poet and
the painter in other spheres than landscape. The "poetry of man,"
to use a common phrase, is as closely allied to the painting which
makes him its subject as is the poetry of nature with landscape-
painting. In describing, for instance, the terrors of war, both arts
will proceed in a similar manner. The ordinary painter will give
you every detail, and descend to every vulgar horror; and the early
and untrained poet will sing to you, like Homer, of "battered brains"
and "
gory eyeballs rolled in dust." But the master-hand, be it
poet's or painter's, will know the conditions of art better than that;
and while telling you all the story that the others tell, will give it

beauty by clothing it in a suggestive veil of pathos, and a Wordsworthian touch like that exhibited in Mr. Rivière's picture of the dying greyhound, entitled "The Last of the Garrison," will be the true imaginative form in which art will depict the horrors of the battle-field. Or, once again, in the sphere of familiar life which English painting has made especially its own, the affinity between the two arts is very close. The simple pictures which Leslie gives us of scenes in everyday English life or of an everyday English girl, are painted in just the same beautiful and suggestive spirit of imagination as that in which the modern English poets have dealt with the "primrose path of common life."

It is not necessary to follow out this line of connection into other spheres; enough has already been said to mark its nature and suggest the universality of its application. But the arts of poetry and painting are united closer still; they do not only express the same spirit, but they often carry it out by the same means. It is not, for instance, any mere affectation or stretch of metaphor to speak of light and shade in poetry. Just as a picture depends on the adjustment of these for its distinctness, so a poem must be toned with varying notes if it is to be a clear and definite whole. Due arrangement and subordination of details, again, which come under the head of light and shade, are tricks of style which poetry and painting use alike. Their importance in painting is obvious enough; no one who walks round the rooms of an average exhibition can fail to be struck by the conspicuousness which their absence gives them in the inferior pictures-where the striking point in a Christ at his daily toil is a neatly-curved shaving, or the prominent feature in some eminent man is the pattern of his watch-chain. While on the other hand we admire the exquisite sense of harmonious completeness which is imparted to the best works by their skilful arrangement of parts-as, for instance, in Sir F. Leighton's "Daphnephoria," where a long company of the "fairest flower of Greece in great procession" only serves to enhance the importance and the beauty of the noble youth who leads it as Apollo's priest. The place of such devices in poetry is not less marked. The Greeks were keenly alive to the use of details, to the force of contrasts, to the influence of relief; whilst in the masterpiece of Goethe, who had learnt the technical lessons of his art from Greek models, these artistic methods are the clue to the whole arrangement of the poem, and many scenes in 'Faust' have no other meaning than to give relief or point a contrast. A fine example of light and shade in poetry is to be found in Mr. Matthew Arnold's Empedocles,' in which the sparkling songs of Callicles and the dark mysterious utterances of the seer stand out the one against the other in the contrast and relief of a master's canvas.

The management of tone, again, is a problem which the poet and the painter have alike to solve. Mr. Stopford Brooke in his 'Primer of English Literature' has suggested a comparison, which we may wish he had developed, between the tones of Shelley and Turner respectively. He would be able to institute a close comparison between many pictures in Turner's second style, with "their vast landscape" (as he finely says)" melting into indefinite distance," and the light and aerial descriptions, which abound in Shelley's 'Prometheus,' where

"the spirits of the mind

Voyage, cloudlike and unpent,
Through the boundless element."

We might illustrate also from Shelley the manner in which Turner, with eminent fidelity to nature, unites several separate tones in the same composition. Mr. Ruskin's description of the "Old Temeraire," in which "the cold deadly shadows of the twilight are gathering through every sunbeam, and where under the blazing veil of vaulted fire which lights the vessel on her last path, there is a blue, deep, desolate hollow of darkness, out of which you can hear the voice of the night wind and the dull boom of the disturbed sea"; this description of Turner's picture reads like a version of a scene in Shelley's poems, luminous and radiant, while it is yet

"dim and dank and grey

Like a storm-extinguished day,
Travelled o'er by dying gleams."

Such general statements as have been made above do not of course exhaust all the painter's and the poet's tricks and statements; they do but show their identity of method and so suggest the affinity that exists between the arts even in the smallest details. Perhaps this affinity cannot be better illustrated farther than by observing how a single word may have the same force in poetry as one dash of colour in painting. It might be pointed out how a strong metaphor corresponds to a bold piece of allegorical design, or a daring epithet to a flight of pictorial imagination; but the affinity which is being traced will be seen more clearly in some smaller point-as, for instance, when it is noticed, under Mr. Swinburne's direction, how the single word "convey," in these lines by Mr. Matthew Arnold. called 'The Buried Life,' lends a grave resonance to the whole in just the same way as a touch of soft colour gives a sweet tone to the whole expression of a picture:

Yet still, from time to time, vague and forlorn,
From the soul's subterranean depth upborne
As from an infinitely distant land,

Come airs, and floating echoes, and convey

A melancholy into all our day."

Such, in some of its aspects, is the close affinity between poetry and painting, and such its pervading application. And yet a painter is not a poet, nor does poetry trench on painting. For although they work in the same spirit, and often use the same methods, they yet employ a different medium and require different gifts. Thus the poet and the painter have all their receptive faculties the same, and the same creative imagination. But here the affinity stops, or, to speak more accurately, diverges along different lines. In the painter his ideas must be transmitted at once into sensuous images; in the poet they must find expression in the logical medium of language. The painter thus appeals primarily to the senses, the poet directly to the mind. Herein lies the one essential distinction between the two arts, and hence spring most of their practical differences. A picture, for instance, cannot represent more than a sensuous image will convey; and painting is limited, therefore, to unities which poetry can afford to disregard. Whilst, again, it is precluded from expressing a transient state with any degree of ease and grace by the fact that the eye cannot appropriately rest long upon it; and thus Lessing would have us see that the agony of Laocoon was most suited to the poet's art. Here then we see

"the painter's sphere!

The limits of his art appear.

The passing group, the summer morn,
The grass, the elms, the blossom'd thorn-
Those cattle couch'd, or, as they rise,
Their shining flanks, their liquid eyes-
These, or much greater things, bat caught
Like these, and in one aspect brought!
In outward semblance he must give
A moment's life of things that live;
Then let him choose his moment well,
With power divine its story tell."

But not only is the range of subjects in the case of poetry and painting severally thus different, but the same conditions lead also to a considerable divergence in their treatment of similar subjects. Since language does not present images to the eye, but thoughts to the mind, the poet must suggest where the painter can depict. Helen on a painter's canvas would assume a definite form; Homer suggests "the charm which Até gave to one fair face," by describing the enthusiasm which she awoke in the breast of many a hero, or the agony of disconsolate longing which her flight entailed upon Menelaus. A country maiden is in a picture a particular image; in Wordsworth's poem