[In the following essay, Olivero comments on Horne's dynamic style in Orion, especially noting its contrast against Keats's notoriously whimsical poetry.]

Horne's Orion is one of the best instances to show how Keats's allegoric way of handling a Greek fable was intimately responsive to the æsthetic ideals of an age fond of a kind of poetry which might adorn subtle, metaphysic conceptions with the radiance of a sumptuous imagery. Keats tried to express the passion and mystery of life by means of symbols derived from an Hellenic legend, and Horne used the same artifice to manifest his theories; the latter, however, goes even farther on this philosophic track, and we find in him a strong tendency to transcendentalism. Allowing for the difference of race and genius, we may say that Horne's method when composing Orion was rather akin to the system followed by Novalis when writing Heinrich von Ofterdingen. The myth of Orion is to him an allegory of the elevation of the soul from earthly passions to pure, eternal love; his fate is to rise, through hard ordeals, from the mire of a brutish life to the effulgence of heaven, to acquire wisdom through sorrow, and, at last, to pass away from earth and to shine, forever young, in the temple of Night blazing with immortal stars;

                                                                                rising still
With nightly brilliance, merging in the dawn,—
And circling onward in eternal youth.(1)

Orion is a symbol of bold, struggling, ever aspiring life; he likes conflict and strife, he tastes a fierce delight in the battle against the gigantic powers of nature; Orion, the builder, the monster-fighter, is the emblem of the indefatigable energy of man, seeking ardently, anxiously, on the dark sea of Life, for the land of supreme, perfect bliss, for the Land of heart's desire. We see him surrounded by the allegorical forms of his giant brothers: Akinetos, the symbol of self-destroying wisdom, living a strange life in the barren land of Inertia, instead of breaking through the forest of Doubt and reaching the glorious fields, where the golden fruits of Fame glitter among clustering flowers,—Rhexergon, the destroyer,—Hormetes, following his wayward impulses, careless of reason,—Harpax, “in rapine taking huge delight,”—Biastor, the emblem of strength without a ruling mind,—Encolyon, the subtly reasoner, the craftiest man in arguing,

                                                                                in all things slow,
The dull retarder, chainer of the wheel.

But Orion, unlike Akinetos, possesses an active wisdom, not a passive one; he knows that hard trials and painful labor are not suffered in vain; unlike Rhexergon and Harpax, he is endowed with sublime aspirations and does not indulge in low pleasures and the cruel ecstasy of slaughter. What mainly distinguishes Orion from his brothers is his spiritual power, his faculty of conceiving dreams superior in beauty and splendor to material things; he is indeed the type of the dreamer, the Shadows-hunter, pursuing bright visions, radiant ideals of goodness, of love, of truth. He perceives the harmony of a sphere,—the sphere of spiritual beauty,—ringing with music, revolving around the earth; through the golden and black pattern woven in the wood by the sunlight, he descries flowers brighter than those springing from the darkness of the ground, gems more refulgent than the colored crystals broken from the rocks, trees of a deeper green, birds with wings of amethyst and fire. Orion has to pierce through the wall of matter in order to reach his aim; and threefold is the symbol of nature: Artemis symbolizes the mystery of nature, Merope, the tragedy of the blind forces of the world, Eos the divine glow of perfect beauty. Artemis allures him to weird, fascinating, haunting visions; crowned with the black poppies of sleep, he tries to forget his power, his proud ambitions, his glorious goal; lying on the misty shore of the violet lake of dreamland, he drinks the influence of nature as a magic philtre; he sees the world aureoled with fairy rays spreading out into mysterious gloom; there is sublimity in every feature of the landscape, but there is also a mystic terror preventing love and comprehension. His dreams disappear into the cold darkness, their rainbow light fading into grey mists; having first flooded his soul with ardent longings they leave behind a heavy, dull melancholy, an inert sadness. Yet Artemis's influence is not without good, as it spiritualizes his wishes, subduing the violence of his temper; and now he is seeking untrodden paths, his lonely heart burning with a strange, unearthly love, while his friends lie weltering in muddy pleasures. Merope then bestows upon him a wonderful, though fallacious, strength, and drags him to terrible ordeals; we see the daring hero rushing down the terraced hillside, waving blazing pines as torches, driving to the surging sea the herds of wild beasts, breaking, mad with terror, from bush and thicket, the trees snapping under their struggling bulks. Blindness falls upon him as a dark crowd of shapeless ghosts; the grasp of Sorrow is tightening around his heart; he sinks in despair, his giant brothers mocking, despising him; but, at last, through the eager, earnest aspirations of his soul, craving for light and love and peace, the sinister vapors arise; the dawn unfolds a glittering flower in the environing gloom, and he again desires the reed-shadowed pools of the forest, looking like mirrors of burnished copper set in green frames of twisted creepers. Eos opens a new world to his soul still trembling with pain and dismay; she admits him into her palace of gold, the Temple of Mercy and Goodness; the eternal splendor pervades his heart; he sees the crown of pale roses and pearls gleam on the forehead of Eos, among the fading stars; Artemis and the goddess of Dawn join in an ardent prayer to Jove, and Orion is endowed with immortal life.

Horne's feeling of natural beauty is sincere and deep; it is in descriptions of landscapes that his glorious imagination is seen at its best; in painting his ideal scenery he lavishes in sumptuous accords the brilliant tints, the translucent shades, the striking effects of light and shadow which haunt his fervid fantasy. He is particularly fond of contrasts; in his pictures the silvery grace of lilies blooms near the gloomy marsh, the peace of cornfields, streaked with the pale gold of the April sun and violet, thin shadows, ends into the weird darkness of a rocky valley; strange, uncouth forms are lurking in the thickets, ruddy with the autumnal bronze, loud with the songs of fairy birds. To him Nature is at once magnificent and tremendous; his emotion is alike that of the first men when they beheld an island, blue with the dawn mists, arise from the sea, a land of wonders, a dwelling of monsters and creatures divine. His mind is haunted by visions of primeval woods, by the aspect of a forest (pp. 71-72),

                                                                                          old as the earth,
                    … lofty in its glooms,
When the sun hung o'erhead, and, in its darkness,
Like Night, …
                    … where the night-black spires
Of pines begin to swing, and breathe a dirge,

by visions of huge stems, looming ghostly, as gigantic snakes entangled in a deadly struggle, their dishevelled branches yelling in the blast, by the appearance of dark floods rushing from the mouths of caves, an uprooted tree emerging as a black octopus from the foaming whirlpool. And he likes to see the forces of nature set free from the veil which darkens them to our eyes; his giants are the personifications of such powerful agencies as we find in a tempest, in the driving clouds of a hurricane, in the fires of lightnings. No passage of the poem can better convey the idea of awe and grandeur, of beauty and terror conceived by Horne than the picture of dragons dying in the waves (pp. 71-72):

                                                                                                    through dark fens,
Marshes, green rushy swamps, and margins reedy,
Orion held his way,—and rolling shapes
Of serpent and of dragon moved before him
With high-reared crests, swan-like yet terrible,
And often looking back with gem-like eyes.
                                                  … The living mass,
Dark heaving o'er the waves resistlessly,
At length, in distance, seemed a circle small,
Midst which one creature in the centre rose,
Conspicuous in the long red quivering gleams
That from the dying brands streamed o'er the waves.
It was the oldest dragon of the fens, …
And now he rose up, like an embodied curse
From all the doomed, fast sinking.

While Keats and Shelley aimed rather at depicting the glorious smile of the Ocean, its blue and green grottos of lapislazuli and malachite, its purple shadows broken by glancing reflections, Horne tried to convey its stern grandeur, its sullen sleep (p. 95):

And passing round between two swelling slopes
Of green and golden light, beheld afar
The broad grey horizontal wall o' the dead-calm sea.
                                                                                The eternal Sea
Before him passively at full length lay,
As in a dream of the uranian Heavens.

He paints with phosphoric tints the moonlight effects, the landscape spell-bound under the radiance of the moon, as of a fairy lamp hanging from a purple dome; the opal paleness of the moon draws a visionary veil over the world; its pearly light, blurring reality, fills him with a mystic spleen, with inexplicable sadness (pp. 116, 15).

Fast through the clouds retring, the pale orb
Of Artemis a moment seemed to hang
Suspended in a halo, phantom-like,
Over a restless sea of jasper fire.
                                                  … Above the isle of Chios
The clear moon lingered … but chiefly sought
With melancholy splendour to illume
The dark-mouthed caverns where Orion lay
Dreaming. …

There seems to be apparently a striking affinity between Keats and Horne; yet this similarity is rather a shallow one, and looking deeper into their artistic tempers we descry wide differences both in their ground ideas and in their tendencies. We never find in Horne's poem the dejection and the despair of the Ode to a Nightingale, the bitter smile of Hyperion; though his sense of beauty is far less keen than Keats's, Horne is endowed with a healthier view of life and with a strong faith as to the results of the struggle for the triumph of a noble ideal; we can trace in Orion a more profound conception of existence than in Endymion, and consequently we are impressed by a deeper meaning in the allegories. While Keats likes to while away the dreamy hours lying under a bower of crimson roses,—stirred now and then into a soft rustle by a spicy breeze,—rapt in a melancholy trance, Horne is fond of active life, of movement and fighting. While reading Lamia and the Ode to Melancholy we seem to wander in an autumnal wood, all red and gold, looking at bright pageants passing in the blue hazy distance, a strange languor stealing into our soul; we enjoy in Orion the rousing feeling of heroic bravery, of undaunted valor. Keats's poetical vision of the universe is dimmed by the dazzling radiance of exterior beauty; Horne endeavors at least to pierce through the glistening veil and perceive the inmost essence of things; at any rate, and whatever his attainments, he likes better to convey the feeling of a landscape, rather than the sensation produced by lines and colors, as Keats would do. This statement might be supported by many instances, among which I shall choose the most characteristic.

                                                                      From the great repose
What echoes now float on the listening air? …
                                                                      … 'Tis Artemis come
With all her buskined Nymphs and sylvan rout,
To scare the silence and the sacred shades,
And with dim music break their rapturous trance.

(p. 4)

                                                                      … with averted face—
As gazing down the woodland vista slopes,
Which oft her bright orb silvered through black shades
When midnight throbbed to silence—Artemis asked,

(p. 11)

Keats's poetry reflects as a magic sphere the shifting hues of his fantasies; Horne's poem mirrors in its dark waters the mystery and passion, the beauty and sorrow of human life. It must be owned, however, that in Horne's treatment of landscape we have unmistakable traces of Keats's influence; we meet with that dewy freshness, with that summer luxuriance, with that sad glitter of nostalgic visions, which are peculiar features of Keats's art. We have in the following passage the queer invention, the quaint fancy which so often strike us in Endymion (pp. 68-69):

                                                                                He approached
And found the spot … was now arrayed
With many-headed poppies, like a crowd
Of dusky Ethiops in a magic cirque,
Which had sprung up … in the night
And all entranced the air.

And here we have the mellow radiance of Keats's palette (p. 131):

Morn comes at first with white uncertain light;
Then takes a faint red, like an opening bud
Seen through grey mist; …
                              the sky … takes a crimson flush,
Puts forth bright sprigs of gold, which soon expanding
In saffron, then pure golden shines the morn;
Uplifts its clear bright fabric of white clouds,
All tinted, like a shell of polished pearl,
With varied glancings, violet gleam and blush.

To find passages fit to compare with the following lines in glorious refulgence of translucid hues we must turn to Shelley (p. 119):

                                                                                Against a sky
Of delicate purple, snow-bright courts and halls,
Touched with light silvery green, gleaming across,
Fronted by pillars vast, cloud-capitalled,
With shafts of changeful pearl, all reared upon
An isle of clear aerial gold, came floating;
And in the centre, clad in fleecy white,
With lucid lilies in her golden hair,
Eos, sweet goddess of the Morning, stood.

Following the example of Keats and Shelley, he adopted a Greek myth as argument to his song; the sunlit beach of the Hellenic land had an irresistible glamour for these souls yearning towards a luminous scenery and an heroic people; side by side with the somber Druid oak of Gothic art there grew in England the fragrant, blossoming laurel of Greek inspiration; yet both were thriving in the garden of Romanticism. Therefore the Hellenic fables assumed a new coloring, acquired a strange, intense life in these Northern minds; it was not till later on that William Morris and Charles Algernon Swinburne dealt with Hellenic arguments in the true Hellenic spirit. We find in Orion a morbid pathos unknown to the Dorian playwrights; we observe in Artemis, in Eos, a romantic melancholy more akin to the dreamy ecstasy pervading Wordsworth's poetry than to the tragic grandeur of Aeschylus's sadness. Likewise the personifications of natural forces in Orion look rather similar to the weird, wild figures of the Edda, than to the serene and stately forms engendered by a classical imagination. We must remark that while the poet of Endymion is inclined to graceful representations of nature, to paint fantastic figures seen in emerald and violet lights, playing with gems in the caves of Cybeles, or dancing under the rainbow arch in Neptune's halls, Horne derives peculiar effects of gloomy grandeur from a rugged scenery, rather dwelling on the mystery of a black tarn, lying motionless and dismal between the beetling walls of rock, than on the orange and blue flowers enamelling the patches of grass in the mountain landscape.

The diction, though far from the vividness and elegance of Keats, is forcible; the rich and flowing language is vigorously handled; the passions of mankind and the struggling forces of nature mingle and blend in this poem, so that we feel, pulsing through the lines, the throbbing of intense life. Notwithstanding the variety of his expressions, by which he tries to adapt his utterance to the different moods of his personages and to the divers aspects of the ambiance,—the terror of storm, the gladness of the green wood, the tragedy of clouds rent by lightnings, the sadness of the leafless bough,—there is a remarkable unity of tone in his style, all the different rhythms merging into a solemn, impressive song, as the themes join and develop in beautiful accord in a symphony. His workmanship is always refined and effective, either in rendering the sombre pageant of the clouds, or in portraying the most peaceful and serene moods of nature, as the noon stillness.² Endowed with a fierce energy of conception, he was naturally fond of broad outlines, of vivid colors; and yet—his classical taste teaching him a careful self-restraint, a forcible concentration,—we find in his verse a Greek subtlety of epithets, conveying the genuine perception through the refracting medium of an exquisite, quickening, truly poetical imagination.³ In considering whether the poet has bestowed upon his fantastic scenes that sense of reality which is the best test of the power of representation, we should turn to details, since they afford the easiest way of analyzing the artist's technique. In Horne we meet with a striking realism in the particulars of his descriptions, a realism which reveals in him a rare, keen faculty of observation; he possesses that sharpness of æsthetic insight and that delicacy of perception which find out immediately the most characteristic features of the landscape or figure looked at; and his remarkable mastery over the language enables him to alight at once on the right word, or turn of phrase, to express an attitude, a movement, a peculiar sound, a shade of color. Let us observe for example the life-like posture of the Sylvans in Artemis's train, waiting for the dance:

And Sylvans, who, half Faun, half shepherd, lead
A grassy life, with cymbals in each hand
Pressed cross-wise on the breast, waiting the sign;
                                        Not a breeze came o'er the edge
          Of the high-heaving fields and fallow lands;
          Only the zephyrs at long intervals
          Drew a deep sigh, as of some blissful thought,
          Then swooned to silence. Not a bird was seen
          Nor heard: all marble gleamed the steadfast sky.

(p. 95)

See Poe's remarks on Horne's technique: “Horne has a very peculiar and very delightful faculty of enforcing, or giving vitality to a picture, by some over vivid and intensely characteristic point or touch. He seizes the most salient feature of his theme, and makes this feature convey the whole.”—Works. The fordham Edition, Vol. V, p. 494.

or the stag bounding away, released from Orion's grasp:

The Giant lowered his arm—away the stag
Breast forwarad plunged into a thicket near;

the loud crackling of trees a-fire:

                                                                                          Orion grasped
Two blazing boughs; one high in air he raised,
The other with its roaring foliage trailed
Behind him as he sped;

and the hues of dawn:

                                                                                Oft when dawn
With a grave red looked through the ash-pale
                    woods, …

(pp. 24, 8, 72, 23)

Horne has a fine sense of color, both for shifting, delusive nuances and bold, glaring hues; we can contrast the notations of the changing purple of snows at sunrise, of green shadows becoming suffused with golden light, of the violet rift in the clouds where appears the high moon, with the glittering image of the woods “all with golden fires alive” at noon, or the opal radiance of Eos's apparition.

Far in the distance, gleaming like the bloom
Of almond-trees seen through long floating halls
Of pale ethereal blue and virgin gold,
A Goddess, smiling like a new-blown flower,
Orion saw.

(pp. 3, 57, 68, 27, 117)

Sometimes he makes the colors stand out with a strange elegance from the background, as in the hunting scene in Book II, adorned with the crude, brilliant dyes of a Flemish tapestry of the fifteenth century.

                                                  The hounds with tongues
Crimson, and lolling hot upon the green,
And outstretched noses, flatly crouched; their skins
Clouded or spotted, like the field-bean's flower,
Or tiger-lily, painted the wide lawns.

(p. 27)

His fantasy is at the same time subtle and daring; Hephaistos's hall [Book I, C. I.] and Orion's dream [Book III, C. I.] show a superrefinement and an audacity of imagination which are only to be found in Robert Browning and Meredith; while he reveals a perfect control over his imaginative faculty by his capacity of checking the impulse, which would at last substitute the bizarre to the beautiful. Moreover the lucidity of his descriptions is the best test of his creative power, which, combined with a vigorous and suggestive form, succeeds in bringing before the inward eye the ideal vision as sharply defined as reality itself. The vividness of the following passage will suffice to support our statement.

They loitered near the founts that sprang elate
Into the dazzled air, or pouring rolled
A crystal torrent into oval shapes
Of blood-veined marble; and oft gazed within
Profoundly tranquil and secluded pools,
Whose lovely depths of mirrored blackness clear—
Oblivion's lucid-surfaced mystery—
Their earnest eyes revealed.(4)

In a passage of the Book II [Canto I, p. 57]⁵ we have a curious instance of that blending of the soul's visions with the real scene, of that intimate union of feeling and sensation, which the French symbolists were, and are, so fond of. Yet a sense of obscurity would very often arise from this emblematic writing, so subjective and personal; therefore Horne turned to mythology as the only way to conciliate his tendency for allegory and the perspicuity of his verse. He was well aware that mythology was a forest of symbols through which any reader could wander at will without fear of losing his way; the classical fables afforded him the opportunity of using allegories already endowed with a definite meaning, and shaped with an exquisite sense of beauty. Nevertheless he was not satisfied with adopting the Greek myths without any change, and thus we find in his poem original symbols and mythologic figures strangely alive with a new fervor of life, as in Chapman and Keats,—enriched with a depth of meaning and a mystic radiance, of which the ancient artists never had the remotest idea.⁶ What gives Horne's lines their suggestive power is a vivid sense of the enigmatic, impassioned beauty of life; there is, for instance, in Merope's figure a strange, intense sadness, and in her eyes a deep vision of Sorrow and Fate, as in one of those sinister and beautiful faces painted by Rossetti, as in those visages evoked by Swinburne with rimes haunting and mournful as an incantation.

Dark were her eyes, and beautiful as Death's
With a mysterious meaning, such as lurks
In that pale ecstasy, the Queen of Shades.

All his artistic faculties converge to produce this effect of life, so that even its most metaphysic passages are not without a grave, alluring charm; even its most ethereal images, dressed in the sumptuous garments of dreams, are instinct with this prominent and predominant sense of reality; thus, in the representation of Orion re-born, ascending among the glittering stars:

                                        Mute they [Eos and Artemis] rose
With tender consciousness; and, hand in hand,
Turning, they saw, slow rising from the sea,
The luminous Giant clad in blazing stars,
New-born and trembling from their Maker's breath,—
Divine, refulgent effluence of Love.(7)

Thus his realism as well as his creative, imaginative power, his careful observation of nature as well as his wild fantasy go together to shape a poetic world deeply alive with passion, mystery and beauty; we can see the results of his genial effort and his highest attainments in such an inspired passage as the following:

Bright comes the Dawn, and Eos hides her face,
Glowing with tears divine, within the bosom
Of great Poseidon, in his rocking car
Standing erect to gaze upon his son,
Installed midst golden fires, which ever melt
In Eos' breath and beauty; rising still
With nightly brilliance, merging in the dawn,—
And circling onward in eternal youth.

Notes

1. P. 158 [London, Chatto and Windus, 1874].

2. Now came the snorting and intolerant steeds
   Of the Sun's chariot tow'ds the summer signs;
             …
   And cleared the heavens, but held the vapours
             there,
   In cloudy architecture of all hues.
   The stately fabrics and the Eastern pomps,
   Tents, tombs, processions veiled, and temples vast,
   Remained not long in their august repose,
   But sank to ruins, and re-formed in likeness
   Of monstrous beasts in lands and seas unknown.

   (Book II, Canto III, p. 83.)

3.                     … ye mountains waving brown
   With thick-winged woods, …
                                 … what odours and what sighs
   Tend your sweet silence through the star-showered
             night, …

   (Book I, Canto I.)

4. P. 55.—See also, p. 5, the picture of the morning landscape:

   The scene in front two sloping mountain sides
   Displayed; in shadow one, and one in light.
   The loftiest on its summit now sustained
   The sun-beams, raying like a mighty wheel
   Half seen, which left the front-ward surface dark
   In its full breadth of shade; the coming sun
   Hidden as yet behind: the other mount,
   Slanting opposed, swept with an eastward face,
   Catching the golden light.

5.                                                                                           Old memories
   Slumbrously hung above the purple line
   Of distance, to the east, while odorously
   Glistened the tear-drops of a new-fallen shower;
   And sunset forced its beams through strangling
             shadows
   Gilding green boughs; …

6. See the lines at p. 6:

   Hunter of Shadows, thou thyself a shade, …

   and the development of this conception at p. 23:

                                                     … a restless dream
   Dawned on his soul which he desired to shape;

   beside, the mystic mood due to Artemis's influence [Book I, Canto III]. The same conception of mythology we find in Maurice de Guérin, though in the author of Le Centaure, as Matthew Arnold says: “the natural magic is perfect. … He has a truly interpretative faculty; the most profound and delicate sense of the life of Nature, and the most exquisite felicity in finding expressions to render that sense” [Essays in Criticism, I Series. Macmillan, 1905, p. 85]. But the same close correspondence between the poetry of nature and the old myths is to be found in both poets, the idea of the hero being the logic result of their enthusiastic feeling of wonder before the majesty and awful stateliness of Nature; in this mood the conception of ideal figures arises spontaneously, and, as Hölderlin sings,

   Wie Flammen aus der Wolke Schooss,
   Wie Sonnen aus dem Chaos, wanden
   Aus Stürmen sich Heroen los.

7. Book III, Canto III, p. 153.