life is told there, and yet but half told, and he longs to become possessed of all the beautiful past that she has seen.  Here is a constant mystery to him, and there is a singular and wistful attraction for him in those still deeps where the thoughts and dreams of an innocent soul lie but half revealed.  He does not see those things in the eyes of women he is not in love with; but when in after years he is carelessly regarding this or the other woman, some chance look, some brief and sudden turn of expression, will recall to him, as with a stroke of lightning, all the old wonder-time, and his heart will go nigh to breaking to think that he has grown old, and that he has forgotten so much, and that the fair, wild days of romance and longing are passed away forever.

RICHARD DODDRIDGE BLACKMORE

(1825-)

The literary success of Blackmore came late in life.  He was born in Longworth, Berkshire, England, in 1825, was graduated at Exeter College, Oxford, and afterwards studied law in the Middle Temple, practicing his profession as a conveyancer.

But his heart was in an outdoor life.  Like his own John Ridd, the hero of ‘Lorna Doone,’ he is a man of the moors and fields, with a fresh breeze blowing over him and a farmer’s cares in his mind.  In 1854-5 he published several volumes of poems under the pen-name of “Melanter.”  ‘The Bugle of the Black Sea’ and a complete translation of Virgil’s ‘Georgics’ appeared in 1871.

Other volumes of verse followed, of which it may be said that he is a poet more sensitive to influence than fertile in original impulse; although some of his prose, in which even rhythm is observed in what seems to be an unconscious manner, displays high original quality.  It is therefore fair to say of him as a poet that while his works did not gain him the reputation that has placed him among the foremost literary men of the day, the subtle influence rural nature exerts on man, and the part it bears in the sweet harmonies of life, are told in passages that are resonant with melody.

The poet’s delight is in the prosperity of the fields, as if they were his friends, and in the dumb loving motherhood with which all nature seems, to his eyes, to surround him.

As the precursor of a summer that yielded such a mellow harvest, the spring of Mr. Blackmore’s fiction was slow and intermittent.  The plot of his stories is never probable, but in his first novel, ‘Clara Vaughan,’ published in 1864, it impairs belief in the general reality of the book; and though there is hint of the power to excite sympathy of which his latter novels prove him so great a master, the intelligence refuses such shrieking melodrama.  ‘Lorna Doone’ therefore came unheralded.  It was published in London in 1869 and slowly grew in favor, then leaped into popularity.  In 1878 twenty-two editions had been printed.