'Like the Norseman of whom he sings, he is everywhere true, brave, generous, and free. He is before all things a patriot. He has an intense belief in the genius of England as the champion of liberty, and the pioneer of freedom.'—The Poets and the Poetry of the Century.

HE is still living, some seventy-five years of age, and it is difficult to write anything of the nature of a biography of one still amongst us. There are a few facts, however, patent to all the world, which may be fitly reproduced. Perhaps the most striking of these is that, like 'Festus Bailey,' he did his best poetical work in his young manhood, and the early promise of ripening in power and of richer fruit-bearing has not been fulfilled. Massey, writing some sweet and inspiring lyrics, and giving evidence of acute appreciation of the masters of literature in his once well-known lectures, seems to have lost himself in a maze of Egyptian and anti-Christian pseudo-philosophies even less edifying than the science evolved from the 'inner consciousness' of such holy men as Jacob Behmen, Peter Sterry, or Swedenborg, and as incomprehensible to the ordinary mind as the strange mysticism of William Blake. He has, as a poet, which was his true function in life, committed intellectual suicide, and his resurrection into mythical regions and pamphleteering on 'Luniolatry,' 'The Seven Souls of Man,' 'The Coming Religion,' and other such subjects, will not only fail to add to his fame, but in the future will be remembered merely by curiosity-hunters as the vagaries of a capable but erratic genius. Like his own Atle the Fur-Hunter in chasing the squirrel, he has lost his sledge-load of treasures. I know that he does not personally think so, and that some, at least, of his friends agree with him. He found verse-making insufficient for subsistence—as, indeed, might have been expected—and it has been written of him that in turning to his final career he began to

'Dredge the old sea-bottoms of the Past, Lover of Beauty who gave up all for Truth.'

Still, we shall ever regret the change.

Some of his best life-work was done by Massey at Brantwood, on the shores of Coniston Water, including 'The Ballad of Babe Christabel,' 'Craig-crook Castle,' and 'War-Waits.' He had come here after a period of stress necessitated by his outward circumstances, which had been of the poorest. His father was a canal-boatman of Tring, in Hertfordshire, and for him, as for all of the wage-earners of those evil days of the Corn Laws and other oppressions, there was virtually no education. He was sent to work in a mill when eight years of age, for twelve hours a day, at 9d. to 1s. 6d. per week. It was the sorrows and sufferings of such little ones as he which inspired Mrs. Browning's never-to-be-forgotten 'Cry of the Children.' Possessed of a resolute will and an inquiring spirit, he taught himself all he could from the very few books accessible to him. While passing through years of poverty and hardship, engaged in straw-plaiting, he associated himself with like-minded youths of his own and a somewhat better social class, threw himself ardently into the progressive movements of the day, and soon found his way into print in some of the restricted and Government-worried local newspapers. When but twenty-one years old he was actually editing a serial called The Spirit of the Age. A year later he became one of the secretaries of the Christian Democratic movement headed by Maurice and Kingsley, wrote verses for various publications, and by-and-by mustered courage to issue his 'Voices of Freedom and Lyrics of Love.' This little book and his next brought him into contact or correspondence with Hepworth Dixon, W. Savage Landor, 'George Eliot,' and Tennyson. Tennyson writes him respecting the 'fine lyrical impulse, and the rich, half-Oriental imagination' he found in his poems. 'George Eliot' is said to have taken him for her model of 'Felix Holt the Radical.' She describes her hero as a somewhat eccentric-mannered young man, shaggy-headed, large-eyed, and strong-limbed, wearing neither waistcoat nor cravat, and in abrupt sentences denouncing unreality and humbug, though amenable to softening social and intellectual influences. This, at any rate, is her introduction of him to her readers. Massey's first love-story (he was happily married) was, at least, as much an idyll, it would appear, as that of Holt, and the deep home love, the consecrated affection of the wedded life, were the inspirations of some of his sweetest lyrics, just as his intense yearnings for the betterment of the common people were that of his patriotic ones. Later in life, after he had left Coniston, we find him an accepted essayist in some leading literary magazines, and a lecturer on literary subjects, living in Edinburgh. Another volume or two, with war songs and ballads among them, evoked by what England has long ago become ashamed of—the Crimean War—completed the first stage of his career, and the only one that concerns us here. He has collected into a volume—adopting a description of himself as 'the most unpublished of authors'—a few of his best poems, which one critic thinks contains everything of his worth preserving. I do not agree with this dictum. Some of his best are omitted, though we have to thank this self-same critic for preserving them for us.

Now comes for me the ungrateful task of selecting from his garden of delights, not posies, but a few blossoms and a few typical petals that may serve to show the form and hue of the blossoms. In doing so, many of the best must of necessity be passed over. Do you know 'Babe Christabel'? Is it not pathetically true to experience? Has it not set many a chord of many a mother's riven heart vibrating as she reads of

'A merry May morn, All in the prime of that sweet time When daisies whiten, woodbines climb, When the dear Babe Christabel was born'?

and how, coming through the 'golden gates of morn' to what seemed a glorious destiny, and touching the earth with a fresh romance for the happy parents, she grew in loveliness only to be caught away, ere reaching womanhood, by angels who gathered her 'delighted as the children do the primrose that is first in spring.' And do you know 'Cousin Winnie'? It is almost as pathetic, and quite as true, only in a different way. It narrates a lad's love for a cousin, married, when she reached maturity, to a friend of his, who brought trouble upon her, and for whom he suffered as she suffered, unable to help, and never telling out his affection for fear of causing division and dissension.

His songs are far from being all sad. They are mostly redolent of bright fancy.

'Pleasant it is, wee wife of mine, As by my side thou art, To sit and see thy dear eyes shine With bonfires of the heart! And Young Love smiles so sweet and shy From warm and balmy deeps, As under-leaf the fruit may try To hide, yet archly peeps; Gliding along in our fairy boat, With prospering skies above, Over the sea of time we float To another New World of Love.'

This lake-poet is not the Laureate of the love of courtship, but of wedded bliss.

'Oh, lay thy hand in mine, dear! We're growing old, we're growing old! But time hath brought no sign, dear! That hearts grow cold, that hearts grow cold!'

begins another of what may be called the 'Darby and Joan' type.

Of the liberty songs, many are familiar to progressive politicians, or were till we got our terrible set-back at the late 'Khaki' election. They need reissuing in a popular form. Most people who read anything of this nature will remember the stanzas with the refrain:

'This world is full of beauty, as other worlds above, And if we did our duty it might be as full of love.'

Such another is 'The People's Advent,' and the best of them 'The Earth for All,' two lines in which were often quoted in former days of agitation:

'Your Mother Earth, that gave you birth, You only own her for a grave.'

Massey's longer poems I dare not even begin to quote from, only giving a few solitary gems of thought by way of conclusion:

'I heard Faith's low sweet singing in the night. And groping through the darkness touch'd God's hand.'

'Ye sometimes lead my feet on the Angel-side of life.'

'Nature at heart is very pitiful, How gentle is the hand doth gently pull The coverlet of flowers o'er the face Of death! and light up his dark dwelling-place!'

'Creeds, empires, systems rot with age, But the great people's ever youthful: And it shall write the future's page To our humanity more truthful.'

Says Gilfillan (a half-forgotten author himself): 'Probably since Burns there has been no such instance of a strong, untaught poet rising up from the ranks by a few strides, grasping eminence by the very mane, and vaulting into a seat so commanding with such ease and perfect mastery.'

A NIGHT RAMBLE

'I can recall ... our delight in the moonlight walk from the Windermere station by the Lakeside to Ambleside, that loveliest five miles in all England; our next day's climb (the track missed) over the Stake Pass, after bathing under the fells in a pool at the head of Langdale; how we lingered, dallying with our joy, on the mountain tops till night came on, a cloudy night of late September, after a day of autumn glory, overtaking us before we could reach the Borrowdale road; how, unable even to grope our way, we lay down together on the stones to sleep, and awakened by rain, crept under an overhanging rock, and cold and hungry, smoked our pipes and talked till the dawning light enabled us to find a path to Stonethwaite; how we sat in a cottage porch to await the rising of the inmates and welcome a breakfast of bad coffee and mutton-ham so salt that it scarified our mouths. No grave-minded man was either of the pair who went laughing and singing, if somewhat limping, on their way.'—William James Linton: Memories.