POETS AND POETRY.
MUSIC.* THE quality of Mr. Freeman's verse is very uneven. Perhaps it is the fact that he generally sticks to one mood and one method that brings this home to the reader. When there is little variety of kind the reader becomes, perhaps, more sensitive to the variety of degree. The present volume, Music, contains two or three narrative poems. One is a psychological study of a man who, fearing that his hearing and sight are getting dim, commits suicide. The other a story, told very elliptically, is of a husband's revenge upon his wife's lover. Neither of these longer poems is particularly successful, though there are striking passages in the second ; but there are some excellent lyrical and reflective pieces in the book. In one of them the poet compares his own sick thoughts to the procession of caterpillars which Fabre describes as forming themselves into a ring and crawling round the rim of an earthen pot and playing Follow my Leader, blind and engaged in a senseless, endless pilgrimage.
"Head to tail in a heaving ring day after day,
- Night after slow night the starving mommets crept, Each following each, head to tail day after day An unbroken ring of hunger—then it was snapt.
I thought of you, long-heaving, homed green caterpillars, As I lay awake. My thoughts crawled each after each, Crawling at night each after each on the same nerve, An unbroken ring of thoughts too sore for speech."
Those of us who have ever suffered from insomnia will admit the force and truth of the simile.
Of the lyrical pieces "Moon Bathers" and a poem called "Music's Echo," which was published first in these columns, and "Knocking at the Door" are among the most attractive.
"0 loose me from thy voice,
Whose whispered syllables Were sweeter once In their soft-hushed, soft-hushing tones • Than desert wells.
0 loose me from thy look.
Sweeps down through cloud-paced night The full moon's shine, And on these shadowed eyes of mine Thy rounded light."
"The Yorkshire House" is also interesting. It is rather in the
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