To walk beyond the third mill-pond
And meet a maiden fair and fond
Expecting me beneath a tree

Of shade for two, but not for three.
Ah, my old Yew, far out of view,

Why must I bid you both adieu?"*

At Oxford he was a marked man for his cleverness and for his audacities; these last brought him to grief there, and going home upon his rustication, he quarrelled with his father. Thereafter we find him in London, where he publishes his first little booklet of poems (1795); only twenty then; counted a fierce radical; detesting old George III. with his whole heart; admiring the rebel George Washington and declaring it; loving the French, too, with their liberty and fraternity song, until it was silenced by the cannonading of Napoleon; thenceforward, he counts that people a nation of "monkeys, fit only to be chained."

But Landor never loved London. We find him presently wandering by the shores of Wales, and among its mountains. Doubtless he takes his

* Colvin cites this from unpublished verses.

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cast-net with him; the names of Ianthé and Ioné decorate occasional verses; a certain Rose Aylmer he encounters, too, who loans him a book (by Clara Reeve), from a sketch in which he takes hint for his wild, weird poem of Gebir, his first long poem-known to very few—perhaps not worth the knowing. It is blind in its drift; war and pomp and passion in it-ending with a poisoned cup; and contrasting with these, such rural beatitudes as may be conjured under Afric skies, with tender love-breezes, ending in other beatitudes in coral palaces beneath the sea. This, at any rate, is the phantasmic outline which a reading leaves upon my own memory. Perhaps another reader may be happier.

That shadowy Rose Aylmer, through whom the suggestion for the poem came, was the real daughter of Lord Aylmer, of the near Welsh country; what Landor's intimacy with her may have been, in its promise or its reach, we do not know; but we do know that when she died, somewhat later and in a far country, the poet gave her name embalmment in those wonderful little verses, which poor Charles Lamb, it is said, in his later days, would

repeat over and over and over, never tiring of the melody and the pathos. Here they are:

Meantime, growing into a tempestuous love for the wild Welsh country, he bargains for a great estate, far up in a valley which opens down upon the larger valley in which lies Abergavenny; and being rich now by reason of his father's death, parts with his beautiful ancestral properties in the Warwickshire region, lavishing a large portion of the sales-money upon the savagery of the new estate in Wales. He plants, he builds, he plays the monarch in those solitudes. He marries, too, while this mountain passion is on him, a young girl of French or Swiss extraction-led like a lamb into the lion's grasp. But the first Welsh quarrel of this poet-monarch - who was severely

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classic, and who fed himself all his life through on the thunder-bolts of Jupiter

was with his neighbors; next with his workmen; then with his tenants; then the magistrates; last with everybody; and in a passion of disgust, he throws down his walls, turns astray his cattle, lets loose his mountain tarns, and leaving behind him the weltering wreck of his half-built home, goes over with his wife to Jersey, off the coast of Normandy. There she, poor, tired, frighted, worried bird maybe with a little of the falcon in her would stay; he would not. So he dashes on incontinently deserting her, and planting himself in

mid-France at the old city of Tours, where he devotes himself to study.

This first family tiff, however, gets its healing, and his wife joining him they go to Como, where Southey (1817) paid them a visit; this poet had been one of the first and few admirers of Gebir, which fact softened the way to very much of mutual and somewhat over-strained praises between these two.* From Como Landor went to

* In his Last Fruits from an Old Tree, p. 334, Moxon Edition, Landor writes: "Southey could grasp great subjects

Pisa-afterward to Florence, his home thenceforth for very many years; first in the town proper and then in a villa at Fiesole from which is seen that wondrous view none can forget who have beheld it-of the valley, which seems a plain- of the nestling city, with its great Brunelleschi dome, its arrow-straight belfry of Giotto, its quaint tower of the Palazzo Vecchio, its cypress sentinels on the Boboli heights, its River Arno shining and winding, and stealing away seaward from the amphitheatre of hills-on whose slopes are dotted white convents, sleeping in the sun, and villas peeping out from their cloakings of verdure, and the gray shimmer of olive orchards.

Landor in Italy.

It was in Florence that Landor wrote the greater part of those Imaginary Conversations which have given him his chief fame; but which, very possibly, may be outlived in the popular mind by the wonderful finish and the Saxon force which belong to many of his verselets.

and master them; Coleridge never attempted them; Wordsworth attempted it and failed.” This is strongly ex parte !