have, for instance, Longfellow and Walt Whitman; while in England we have not only Arthur Clough, and R. Buchanan, but also Mr. Swinburne, who wrote recently the "Songs before Sunrise." These poets at all events have proved that they do not, from feeling their own impotence, desire to insult their Mother-Age, and charge her with all the responsibility of a defect, which after all may not be of quite cosmical urgency. More recently still, Mr. Alfred Austin seems to have comically disproved his own somewhat juvenile criticism on the futility of the age, and the consequent inevitable futility of its poets, by himself writing a really fine poem on contemporary events, "Rome or Death."
However, in the following work I have the so much desiderated advantage of remoteness—remoteness, if not in time, at least in place. Africa is a long way off; Cook's tourists do not go to Ujiji; and both men and nature in Africa are very different from what they are immediately around us—if that be an advantage. My object has been
