[In the following excerpt, Reid recounts Milnes' publications of poetry and surveys the contemporary criticism of these works.]

To the present generation the poetry of Lord Houghton is practically known only in connection with one or two brief pieces, of unimpeachable grace and melody, which have attained a popularity that is literally worldwide. His more important works, as well as many shorter poems that are in every way equal in merit to those that have secured a lasting popularity, are but little known to the readers of to-day. The changes of fashion, which are as marked in literature as in dress, account in part for a fact of which no one was more conscious than Lord Houghton himself. In part, too, we may attribute it to the undisputed pre-eminence in the world of poetry of the great singer who had been Houghton's friend at college, and whose rapid growth in power and fame none had watched with greater pleasure than he had done. Nowadays it may seem strange, almost unintelligible to the ordinary reader, that there was a time when Monckton Miles was looked upon as the destined successor to the premiership in English poetry. I have mentioned how, at a breakfast at Rogers's, Landor stoutly maintained that he was the greatest poet then living and writing in England; and there were many who shared Landor's opinion. No such estimate of himself was ever made by Milnes, nor will it be set forth here; but this, at least, is certain, that if an opinion which exalted him to such a pinnacle was exaggerated, the comparative neglect into which his poetry has of late years fallen is entirely undeserved. A great singer he may not have been; a sweet singer with a charm of his own he undoubtedly was; nor did his charm consist alone in the melody of which he was a master. In many of his poems real poetic thought is linked with musical words; whilst in everything that he wrote, whether in verse or in prose, one may discern the brightest characteristics of the man himself—the catholicity of his spirit; the tenderness of his sympathy with weakness, suffering, mortal frailty in all its forms; the ardour of his faith in something that should break down the artificial barriers by which classes are divided, and bring into the lives of all a measure of that light and happiness which he relished so highly for himself. Like all other men who write much, he was unequal in his work; and, at times, in his poetry the tricks of conventionalism, alike in substance and in form, were plainly to be seen. But there were other times when it was clear that the song sprang from the singer's heart, and that he had poured forth in it the real inspiration of a soul which could rise above the sordid commonplaces of life.

One of his friends used to tell in later years how, chancing to sit beside Houghton in a company of which Tennyson happened to be a member, the former said, pointing to the Poet-Laureate, "A great deal of what he has done will live;" and then added, half, as it were, to himself, "and some things that I have done should live too." It was no overweening estimate of his own merit. Some of the verses he has added to English literature will not easily lose their place in it. The reader in this story of his life has seen Monckton Milnes chiefly as the busy man of society, the ambitious politician in his younger days, the leisured literary expert of his maturity, the kindest of friends both in youth and in age—and perhaps this was all that the later generation saw in him. But nothing could be more unjust than to forget that—at any rate, until he reached middle life—he held a high place in the estimation of his contemporaries as a poet, and that great hopes were cherished for his future by a wide circle of men and women throughout Europe. The season of his activity in the production of poetry was comparatively brief. He first made his appearance before the public, with his Memorials of a Tour in Greece, in 1834; and it was just ten years later, in 1844, that he published Palm Leaves. In these ten years he brought forth a remarkable quantity of verse; and though, as I have said, his productions were of unequal merit, it may be confidently affirmed that in the work of these ten years there was much that no lover of English poetry would willingly let die. The Memorials of a Tour in Greece were followed in 1838 by The Memorials of a Residence on the Continent, and Historical Poems, and The Poems of Many Years, printed in the first instance for private circulation only. In 1840 appeared another volume of poetry collected from the magazines, to which he was then a regular contributor, and including his Poetry for the People; whilst four years later appeared his Poems: Legendary and Historical, which included several pieces published in former volumes, and his little volume of Palm Leaves. After that date, which coincides with the commencement of his serious political career, he wrote but little poetry, though many of the pieces which subsequently appeared from his pen had all the charm that belonged to his work in his earlier days. He had always maintained that to write poetry was an admirable preparation for the writing of prose; and after 1844 it was in prose, rather than in verse, that he gave his thoughts to the world. He had already, in his remarkable One Tract More, published in 1841, given proof of the fact that he was the master of an admirable style. He was even then writing regularly in the Quarterly and Edinburgh reviews, and was doing much to create the taste of that generation for the writings of those younger men upon whom the elder reviewers had frowned persistently. Let it always be remembered to his credit that he was one of the first to tender, through the pages of a great review, the full acknowledgment of the genius of Tennyson. In later years it was his happy lot to make another great poet—Algernon Swinburne—similarly known to the outer world; and again and again, in the course of those critical writings of his, he gave proof of the keenness of his perception where genius was concerned, and of the absolute freedom from jealousy which characterised his critical utterances when he was helping to introduce a new writer to the world of letters.

One Tract More was followed in 1842 by his pamphlet entitled Thoughts on Purity of Election. Two or three years after that time he devoted himself with great thoroughness to a more serious task, the writing of that Life of Keats which still maintains its place as a standard biography. This appeared in 1848, and in 1849 came the pamphlet on The Events of 1848, to which I have referred at length elsewhere. There was a long interval after this, during which his literary labours were almost wholly anonymous, though they comprised many pieces of work of rare merit, such as the short poem on "Scutari" published in the Times, the lines on Thackeray which appeared after the death of the great novelist in the Cornhill Magazine, the sympathetic notice of David Gray prefixed to his poem "The Luggie," and many articles on the chief books of the time in the Edinburgh and Quarterly reviews. In 1866 a volume of selections from his poetry appeared, and this revived for a time the poetic fame of his earlier years. Seven years later came the best of his prose works, his volume ofMonographs, a work which in the fulness of its knowledge, derived almost entirely from personal experiences, in the soundness of its critical judgment, and in the charm of its style, has an excellence that is almost unique. In 1876 the collected edition of his poems appeared, and enjoyed a considerable popularity. In addition to his writings in the two great quarterlies, he contributed largely to the Fortnightly Review, under the editorship of Mr. Morley, and to the Pall Mall Gazette, under that of Mr. Greenwood, whilst in later years he took a warm interest in the Academy, and was a not infrequent writer in its pages. One cannot but regret that he never set himself to a task for which he was so well fitted, the writing of a book in which we should have had something like a complete picture of the society of his own time, a picture for which the Monographs might well have been regarded as preparatory sketches. Such a work from such a pen would have had an altogether exceptional interest and value; but that inability to make any prolonged or continuous effort from which he suffered in his later days stayed his hand, and although more than once he seriously contemplated a book of this kind, his intentions remained unfulfilled, and not even a fragment of the promised memoirs was discovered after his death. But even as it is, the volume of his literary labours was large, and the substance of undoubted merit.

It is hardly the part of a biographer to assume the critic, and it will perhaps be more to the purpose if I record here rather the judgment of the best critics of his own day upon his writings than attempt to pass any verdict of my own. So far back as 1838 the Quarterly Review devoted a long article to the poems of Trench and Milnes, in which full justice was done to the merits of the latter, though the writer was not blind to the desultoriness of his mind, and concluded his review by expressing the earnest hope that he would yet give his talents fair play by devoting himself of set purpose to some serious labour. In the same year another Quarterly reviewer rebuked him for having allowed himself to be led astray by the new lights of the hour:

We are quite sure [said this critic, who accurately represented the standard of critical judgment in his time] that Monckton Milnes will hereafter obey one good precept in an otherwise doubtful Decalogue,

"Thou shalt believe in Milton, Dryden, Pope,"

and regret few sins of his youth more bitterly than the homage he has now rendered at the fantastic shrines of such baby-idols as Mr. John Keats and Mr. Alfred Tennyson.

Perhaps, after quoting this remarkable passage, I am hardly doing a service to the subject of my memoir when I say that the critic announced, in conclusion, that "in spite of all their weaknesses and affectations, Milnes's poems contain better English verses than have as yet been produced to the public by any living writer not on the wrong side of the Mezzo Cammin."

Some years later, in 1843, he was again the subject of serious attention from the critics.

Milnes [said a writer in one of the leading magazines] is a true poet for the people, though not of them. He is a scholar, a gentleman, and a Tory of the Coleridgian school. An old Quarterly reviewer, in a notice of his poetry, speaks of him as "a leading pupil of that school, which embraced some of the most intelligent politicians and best instructed of the nobility of England. . . . We may add, though it may be considered somewhat irrelevant, that Milnes is besides a poet for the scholar. He has a fine antique imagination of the past, and reverence for the memorials and monuments of national and personal greatness, that cannot fail to awaken the sympathies of the retired student, who knows nothing of political distinctions, but worships all of the remnants of every faded glory. Our poet has a fine chivalry of nature that by no means unfits him for the advocacy of the rights of his fellows, yet which adds an additional grace to the manliness of his thoughts and style, rendering him an attractive author to those who might be repulsed by the homeliness of one class of his productions.

It was in the same year that Christopher North, in Blackwood, devoted a pleasant article to his verse, quoting as worthy of special commendation that poem on "The Flight of Youth" which Milnes himself always regarded as his best.

We read these lines [said Christopher] without fearing to let all their pathos fall upon our spirits, for into its depths, should that pathos sink, it will find there a repose it cannot disturb, or a trouble it cannot allay. The truths they tell have been so long familiar there, that we seem to hear but our own voice again, giving utterance to thoughts that for many years have lain silent, but alive, in their cells, like slumberers awakened at midnight by solemn music, lifting up their heads for a while to listen, and then laying them down to relapse into the same dreams that had possessed their sleep. But ye who are still young, yet have begun to experience how sad it is and mournful exceedingly to regret, perhaps to weep over, the passing away of the past, because that something was that never more may be, ponder ye on the strain, and lay the moral, the religious lesson, it teaches within your hearts. So may the sadness sanctify, and the spirits that God sends to minister unto us children of the dust find you willing to be comforted, when Youth has left you heedless if to despair—for, angel though he seemed, he is not of Heaven; but of Heaven are they, and therefore immortal."

After an exordium such as this, from one who was by no means the kindliest of critics, it is only fair that the reader should have the opportunity of judging Milnes's more serious verse for himself, and I therefore quote his lines on "The Flight of Youth" as being those which not only received the unstinted commendation of the ablest men among his contemporaries, but which, as I have said, seemed in his own opinion to be the best that he had written.

THE FLIGHT OF YOUTH.

NO, though all the winds that lie
In the circle of the sky
Trace him out, and pray and moan,
Each in its most plaintive tone,—
No, though Earth be split with sighs,
And all the Kings that reign
Over Nature's mysteries
Be our faithfullest allies,—
All—all is vain:
They may follow on his track,
But he never will come back—
Never again!

Youth is gone away,
Cruel, cruel youth,
Full of gentleness and ruth
Did we think him all his stay;
How had he the heart to wreak
Such a woe on us so weak,
He that was so tender-meek?
How could he be made to learn
To find pleasure in our pain?
Could he leave us, to return
Never again!

Bow your heads very low,
Solemn-measured be your paces,
Gathered up in grief your faces,
Sing sad music as ye go;
In disordered handfuls strew
Strips of cypress, sprigs of rue;
In your hands be borne the bloom,
Whose long petals once and only
Look from their pale-leavèd tomb
In the midnight lonely;
Let the nightshade's beaded coral
Fall in melancholy moral
Your wan brows around,
While in very scorn ye fling
The amaranth upon the ground
As an unbelievèd thing;
What care we for its fair tale
Of beauties that can never fail,
Glories that can never wane?
No such blooms are on the track
He has past, who will come back
Never again!

Alas! we know not how he went,
We knew not he was going,
For had our tears once found a vent,
We' had stayed him with their flowing.
It was as an earthquake, when
We awoke and found him gone,
We were miserable men,
We were hopeless, every one!
Yes, he must have gone away
In his guise of every day,
In his common dress, the same
Perfect face and perfect frame;
For in feature, for in limb,
Who could be compared to him?
Firm his step, as one who knows
He is free, where'er he goes,
And withal as light of spring
As the arrow from the string;
His impassioned eye had got
Fire which the sun has not;
Silk to feel, and gold to see,
Fell his tresses full and free,
Like the morning mists that glide
Soft adown the mountain's side;
Most delicious 'twas to hear
When his voice was trilling clear
As a silver-hearted bell,
Or to follow its low swell,
When, as dreamy winds that stray
Fainting 'mid Æolian chords,
Inner music seemed to play

Symphony to all his words;
In his hand was poised a spear,
Deftly poised, as to appear
Resting of its proper will,—
Thus a merry hunter still,
And engarlanded with bay,
Must our Youth have gone away,
Though we half remember now,
He had borne some little while
Something mournful in his smile—
Something serious on his brow:
Gentle Heart, perhaps he knew
The cruel deed he was about to do!

Now, between us all and Him
There are rising mountains dim,
Forests of uncounted trees,
Spaces of unmeasured seas:
Think with Him how gay of yore
We made sunshine out of shade,—
Think with Him how light we bore
All the burden sorrow laid;
All went happily about Him,—
How shall we toil on without Him?
How without his cheering eye
Constant strength embreathing ever?
How without Him standing by
Aiding every hard endeavour?
For when faintness or disease
Had usurped upon our knees,
If he deigned our lips to kiss
With those living lips of his,
We were lightened of our pain,
We were up and hale again:—
Now, without one blessing glance
From his rose-lit countenance,
We shall die, deserted men,—
And not see him, even then!

We are cold, very cold,—
All our blood is drying old,
And a terrible heart-dearth
Reigns for us in heaven and earth:
Forth we stretch our chilly fingers
In poor effort to attain
Tepid embers, where still lingers
Some preserving warmth, in vain.
Oh! if Love, the Sister dear
Of Youth that we have lost,
Come not in swift pity here,
Come not, with a host
Of Affections, strong and kind,
To hold up our sinking mind,
If She will not, of her grace,
Take her Brother's holy place,
And be to us, at least, a part
Of what he was, in Life and Heart,
The faintness that is on our breath
Can have no other end but Death.

A criticism upon some of his later poems appeared in the Quarterly Review from the pen of his friend Mr. W. D. Christie. In this criticism Milnes was compared favourably with any of the young writers of his day. The melody of his verse, we are told, was perfect, "his language chaste, correct, and nervous. Thought, feeling, and fancy abound in his poems; and there are not a few, especially in the earlier volumes, which prove him capable of the highest efforts of 'shaping imagination."'

I have given these brief extracts from contemporary criticism in order to show how Milnes struck the men of his own day at the time when he was bringing forth his poetry. In later years, when a generation had arisen which knew him well as a social favourite, but hardly knew him at all as a poet, there were still those who maintained the accuracy of the judgment they had pronounced many years before. Among these was Mr. Christie, who, writing in Macmillan's Magazine, said:—

If Richard Monckton Milnes had not been a man of the world, and a busy politician, and if he had been able to concentrate his energies on poetry, and gird himself to the building up of some great poem, none who know what poetry he has written can doubt that it was in him to be a great poet; and none who know his Life of Keats, or any of his many pamphlets and articles in reviews and magazines, will deny that he presents another example of what he himself has lately proclaimed and supported by much good proof, that a good poet makes himself a good prose writer.

A still later critic, [in The World, August 22nd, 1883.] after quoting Landor's estimate of Milnes, "the greatest poet now living in England," added some words of genuine critical insight:—

Startling as this opinion may sound now, there would have seemed nothing surprising in it when it was originally uttered. There were many competent critics who held that you were appreciably Tennyson's superior in the chosen walk of his genius; nor is it inconceivable that if your destiny had been different, you would have done poetic work of imperishable calibre. As it is, you have written much which will always have a place in every anthology of English verse. The originality of your genius declared itself in the extreme freshness, the keen insight, and the vivid truth of your productions. You were as anxious to show men Nature, and as successful in showing it, as was Wordsworth himself. The form taken by your interpretation of the Universal Mother was all your own. When it is recollected that the age in which you accomplished this was wedded to literary artificiality, that it was the epoch of false sentiment, tawdry rhetoric, and spurious imagery, it must be allowed to constitute a considerable achievement. Much indeed that you wrote does not rise above the level of the best album epigraphs of the period; while many of your most exquisite compositions have been set to music, and are cheapened by their associations with importunate piano strummings. But when all deductions on these grounds have been made, there is yet enough in your public writings to vindicate your claim to a respectable niche in the shrine of the Muses. You were the poet of society; you did not, indeed, write in the accepted sense of the term "society verses," but every verse which came from your pen was primarily intended for polite minds. A little more zeal and enthusiasm, a little more of that fire which would have burned less fitfully in a different social atmosphere, would have saved you from that tendency to desultoriness and trifling which was ever your besetting sin. The true charm of your poems is that they furnish those who read them carefully with something like a philosophy of existence; but the philosophy is only partially revealed. You give us glimpses of every kind of life and character, but they are glimpses only. When you touch a deep chord, you suddenly withdraw your hand as if you had been guilty of some breach of good taste. There is something tantalising in the way in which you play with profound problems, and dally with dark enigmas. What is probably your most familiar poem, "Strangers Yet," is also your most characteristic, and in it I read as follows:—

"Oh, the bitter thought to scan
All the loneliness of man!
Nature, by magnetic laws,
Circle unto circle draws;
But they only touch when met,
Never mingle—strangers yet."

To some these lines may seem commonplace because of their familiarity. As a matter of fact there is nothing commonplace about them. They belong to an extremely high order of poetic thought and feeling; but they bear the impress of a hand which, qualified as it is to lift the curtain on the mysteries and contradictions of life, will not do so because it would be a work of some trouble.

When Mr. Forster wrote to a friend describing his first meeting with Milnes, he spoke of him as a man "with some small remnant of poetry left in his eyes, and nowhere else;" but in later years, when Forster knew his friend better, he would not have repeated that superficial judgment, the first which naturally occurred to the man who met the poet for the first time, and who judged from the outward side of things only. It is true that as the years passed, and the constant strain of social life, mingled with those demands of duty and ambition which he never forgot, pressed upon Milnes, the poetic side of his nature was driven from the surface, showing itself outwardly at all events "only in his eyes"; but, as to the last day of his life he continued to write verse, so to the end, deep down in his soul, was a well of pure poetic thought. Its existence, unsuspected by the multitude, hidden with care from ordinary society, was known to those who knew him best, and to the last in their eyes he was not merely the man who had written poetry, but the poet who could still judge the world around him from a different and a higher standpoint than that of his ordinary fellow-creatures. But to what purpose do we dwell here upon what might have been in the case of a man like Lord Houghton? Of what avail are regrets for that which never came to pass? Doubtless these questions occur to the mind of the reader; but no picture of Milnes's life and character would be complete which did not show how, as in his college days his old friend Stafford O'Brien had prophesied would be the case, he came "near something very glorious, though he never reached it." . . .