and the hunter's moons to the tone and note of the field and the fell. The richness, the quietness, the happiness of it all, with its sense of accomplishment, materially represented by rows of yellow and golden stacks of corn and hay rimming the skyline or shining in the valley, has taken its place in the consciousness of the race, and especially in the consciousness of our poets. When Keats wrote his "Ode to Autumn" he, whom some think a Grecian born out of due time, was brimming with England's charm: then, altogether from differences of tongue, the Italian poet, the French poet, the Spanish poet and the English poet, the Icelandic or Norse poet are separated one from another by deeps that can never be freely crossed. This fact is not sufficiently kept in mind when we speak, for instance, of the influence of the Italian Renaissance on English poetry. No doubt there was the influence, with its indelible marks on the evolution of poetic thought and even poetic forms; but the influence, before it began to operate, had to accommodate itself to an alien nature, to strange plains and hills and rivers, and to a sea claiming no kinship to the Adriatic. Language, like physical form itself, has to yield to the pecu- Conspiring with him how to load and liar charm. American poetry is not English poetry. Walt Whitman and Swinburne, both flinging out their songs to the morning, write in a different tongue. When Dante wrote even the "Paradiso" he had not lost touch with Italy, and yet there is no poem so detached from the lure of home. The universal Shakespeare is in Warwickshire all the while, a home-dwelling genius, commanding from his lowly cot all the spirits of the air. When the inspired translators of the English Bible wrote they brought Palestine into England. English scenery peers (as from a disordered stage) not once or twice but continually from their narrative. Every land has the distinctive something that finally stamps the poetry of that land. The English note is the English harvest scenery; the infinitude of fields ripe unto harvest; the variety of fruits; the ceaseless succession of wild flow. ers; the peculiar beauty of hedgerow and path and stream and river; the contrast of quiet green fields, and all the manifold tints of green in the woodlands, to the golden harvests; and, above all, the exquisite sunsets that attune themselves through the harvest Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun; bless With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eaves run; To bend with apples the mossed cottage-trees And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store? Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find Thee sitting careless on a granary floor, Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind; Or on a half-reaped furrow sound asleep, Drowsed with the fume of poppies. while thy hook Spares the next swath and all its twinèd flowers: Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they? Think not of them, thou hast thy music too While barred clouds bloom the softlydying day, And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue. Few more perfect poems exist in the English language. It reveals the autumn scenes in a way and with an ex actness hardly matched elsewhere. But the scene is not far from the heart of any one of our poets since the Reformation. Swinburne's Italian poems have the English scene often in contrast. "Siena" begins: Inside this northern summer's fold The green veiled air is full of doves; But I, for all this English mirth Desire what here no spells can raise. Her beauty bare. Here Swinburne throws the two consciousnesses into vivid contrast. To the poet there is a bridgeless deep between England and Italy, even in song. And another poet, who certainly loved Italy not less than Swinburne, and Greece not less than Keats, has the autumn of England in his poet heart: Oh, good gigantic smile o' the brown old earth, This autumn morning! How he sets his bones To bask i' the sun, and thrusts out knees and feet For the ripple to run over in its mirth. Clough, from first to last, had the note at heart. Keats might have written "The Shady Lane": Again in vision clear thy pathwayed side I tread, and view thy, orchard plots again With yellow fruitage hung,—and glimmering grain Standing or shocked through the thick hedge espied; This hot still noon of August brings the sight. In later years, absent once more, he wrote: Green fields of England! Wheresoe'er Across this watery waste we fare, Your image at our hearts we bear, Green fields of England, everywhere; while that bright West which gave hope to his despondent mind was, who can doubt, our harvest sunset. A better instance, perhaps, than these is Matthew Arnold, who, despite his classicism and his frequent yearning for the grand style, finds his deepest inspiration in the most familiar English scenery. In "Thyrsis" he contrasts, as Swinburne does in "Siena," English and Italian scenery; but who shall say with either poet that "a folding of the Apennine" equalled that "quiet colored end of evening" that Browning placed in Italy and saw, deny it who will, in England. But, travel as the poets may, "Thyrsis" will come home: Why faintest thou? I wander'd till I died. Roam on! still. Dost thou ask proof? One tree yet crowns the hill, The light we sought is shining Our scholar travels yet the loved hillside. A poet such as Barnes is, of course, redolent of his countryside; but he brings the harvest home with a vividness that is almost uncanny: An' still the pulley rwope do heist The wheat vrom red-wheel'd waggon beds, An' ho'ses there wi' lwoads o' grist, Wild spirit which art moving everywhere; Destroyer and preserver; hear, oh! hear. Every aspect of the Autumn and the harvest stand out revealed in our nineteenth-century poets. With a sudden sense of realism they turned to Nature, to our English Nature, and painted in every phase the beauty, the ripeness, the utility, the wonder, the peace, the passion, the tumultuous and cleansing end of our harvesting. Nor do they forget the sunset, that daily and ever more beautiful phase of autumn days; the pageantry of sunset that finds its frequent echo in the East, the brilliant scarlets and gold, the moving cloudshapes that in their glory seem to hide an infinity of glory, the long shadows on field and hill, until, to quote Wordsworth's wonderful "Evening Walk": Now, with religious awe, the farewell light Blends with the solemn coloring of night; Mid groves of clouds that crest the mountain's brow, And round the west's proud lodge their shadows throw, Like Una shining on her gloomy way, The half-seen form of Twilight roams astray; No wreck of all the pageantry remains. Unheeded night has overcome the vales; On the dark earth the wearied vision fails; Now o'er the soothed accordant heart we feel A sympathetic twilight slowly steal, And ever, as we fondly muse, we find The soft gloom deepening on the tranquil mind. Probably no poets of any age in any country have come nearer to reality than the English poets of the last century; but it would be of interest to compare the home-note of other poets in other lands in relation to the harvest-time. Of course, all lands sing of their harvest, of their corn and wine. But, leaving folk-songs aside, a certain artificiality, often so magnificent an artificiality that it apes the very heart of Nature, seems to beset other great literatures, excepting always HeThe Contemporary Review. brew literature. Can it be that the very homeliness of English scenery demands true realism, an art which, adding to Nature, is yet an art that Nature gives? To say so is perhaps provincial but to the present writer it seems true. PHOTOGRAPHY OF THE WILD. "The rifle has been abandoned for the camera," wrote Mr. Roosevelt enthusiastically, in an introduction, not long since, to a book of animal photography. The importance of the saying is a little minimized by the fact that the author of it is now engaged in shooting elephants in Africa. The expedition is equipped, however, with cameras as well as rifles, and the world has already seen some trophies of the former that seem likely to be more valuable than the spoil of the latter. Our Nimrods may be too deeply carven not to think that the highest good is to destroy the "tall deer" and other creatures that they love as their brothers, but already the world thinks rather lightly of them unless they can also record their prowess and the courage or beauty of their victims in something more real than skins and antlers. For the purpose of the inevitable book or lecture, at any rate, the camera has become indispensable. We should have thought that the sport value of the hunting camera would prove far higher than that of the shot-gun or rifle. The difficulties are greater, the danger at least as real, for even the bear that has been infuriated by a wound has very little chance against the equipment of the modern hunter. There remains the result. In the one case a mass of death resurrected in some ghastly fashion by the hired skill of the taxidermist; in the other case, a living record for which the hunter is solely responsible. The only things in favor of the deadhunter are the reality of the trophy, which makes the hunt savor of pothunting and its uniqueness. The animal that the hunter has dispatched no other may take a share in. It is finished for ever, and the next hunter must find another subject, whereas another photographer and another may arise and take the same big stag as we, and perhaps take him better. The truth is, perhaps, that photographers are made of sterner stuff than the average hunter. Who would wait hour after hour as the Keartons have done, crouching, cramp-racked, in the skin of a sheep or tormented by mosquitos that they dare not brush away, for the sake of shooting even a raven or an eagle? There are, perhaps, men in the gun-room who would take a camera and face the lion in his native desert, but none who can see the fun of staying up all night in order to photograph even the last British phalarope or bearded tit. Yet our books abound with photographs of the intimate domestic life of common, but timid, birds, every one of which must have cost hours of patience and resource to obtain. The new sport is undoubtedy one that calls for, and obtains, many virtues of a high order. In its earliest days, animal and bird photography was very like the "night lining" that is the lowest form of fishing. Having fixed the camera at the bird's nest, or other place where the subject was bound to come sooner or later, we retired to the end of a long rubber tube with a big bulb which, very smartly squeezed, would sometimes actuate the pneumatic release and sometimes not. The first picture of the kind that the writer made, and one of the best, was exposed with a pull on a long string, the shutter being the "up and down" elastic affair and the camera fixed focus, fixed front, fixed everything. The subject of that earliest experiment by the way is one of the best for the beginner—a missel thrush feeding her young in the nest so often obligingly placed in the lowest fork of an apple tree before the leaves are on. Later, the amateur electrician fixed up for us the more controllable release worked by the mere pressure of a but ton. With this apparatus you retire so far out of the bird's sight that you yourself have but a poor idea of what the bird is doing when you make the exposure. It may give you an ungainly back view, it may be out of focus because too far or too near, it may not be near the nest at all. The nadir of "night-line photography" was reached when we fixed matters so that the bird itself by snapping a thread made its own exposure, walked into a trap that snarled and clicked at it but, happily, seemed to fail to grab a leg. We might come back hours later to see whether the trap had sprung or no, and then it served us right if we found on the negative nothing more interesting than a cow's foot, or something that looked like a hedgehog. We were not fortunate at this method of animal photography, and we have not heard of anyone who was-except in the securing of a somewhat comic genre. By the time a few imitators had followed the Keartons into the field with tube and electric wire, the masters had exhausted the possibilities of that form of approach, and had found means to bring their subjects under the range of the stand camera with an operator at the focussing screw. Sometimes a thrush or blackbird had built near a cowshed in the fields and could be photographed almost to the heart's content by a quiet operator in command of a convenient knot-hole. Shyer woodland species were stalked by these indefatigable men disguised as mossgrown polards; and dippers, wheatears, and others were outwitted by means of stage rocks that gradually appeared in their haunts and contained the crouching naturalist and his apparatus. The hollow sheep and trojan bullock were invented for the benefit of curlew, plover, and other shy birds that nest in the open plain. If our naturalists had been given the magic gift of fernseed, they could scarcely have outwitted more completely the creatures of the wild that we formerly "studied" by means of the scatter-gun and the rifle. Science has given us, it is true, the shoulder camera with which the very skilled can take flying shots, and the artillery of the telephoto lens, means of which a good sitter can be taken at the distance of half-a-mile or more, but all the great triumphs of animal photography have been won by means of infinite patience and the stealthy approach of the artist within actual camera range. by The lion pictures sent to America and Europe by President Roosevelt's expedition remind us that even the nocturnal animals are not safe from the attention of the camera. In the thick silence of night they may be pursuing the avocations of the most shy-badgers digging out wasps' nests, foxes wooing pheasants from the boughs, lions stalking their prey or in the act of leaping on the tethered calf. Then, in one act, the flashlight rips the darkness to tatters, and the camera regis |