RECENT TERSE.* OF the thirteen singers whose works lie before

us, there can be no question whose is the most fresh and original voice. Mr. Charles Doughty, whatever his faults, is no imitator. Alike in conception and in execution, his epic, of which the first eight books are now published, is a thing by itself, with merits as strange as its defects. It tells the story of Britain from a date long before the dawn of sober history. It is the epic of the Gaulish races from their first occupation of Western Europe, and, like Mr. Hardy's Dynasts, it is rather a cosmic than a human tale. The stage is so immense, and the unities of time and space are so utterly discarded, that Kings and warriors come and go like shadows, acquiring a sublimity from their very insignificance in the mighty drama. The obvious criticism is that the story is so ill-told that it is scarcely a story at all. In the multitude of details and the confusion of names it is hard to feel the consecutive march of events. We are carried with Brennus and his Gauls to the sack of Rome, plunged into conflicts with the wilder Northmen, shown a multitude of later folk-wanderings, the cam- paigns of the Teutons and the Cimbri, Caesar's con- quests, the descent of the Gauls on Greece. And then comes the birth of Christ, and we are hurried back to Britain with the first mythical Christian missionaries, and the poem becomes a moral allegory, where the forces of dark- ness fight against the new Gospel. The style is a mosaic of crabbed archaisms, many of them of doubtful philological accuracy. And yet, when all this has been said, the work remains an extraordinary performance. It is likely to be too much praised, just as it will be too much blamed, because of its strangeness. The tortuous syntax is a defect, not a virtue, and the mazes of discursive detail exceed the most loose traditions of the epic. But there remains at the back a wonderful imaginative power, which has created out of vague legends a new world, full of a curious grandeur and beauty. No quotation can give any taste of its quality, for there are no purple patches, and the reader must fall in with the author's scheme before he can realise his power. But we would refer to such incidents as the crossing of the Alps, the death of Brennus, the Gauls at Delphi, the sailing of Mnason's ships, and the whole tale of the voyage as showing Mr. Doughty's imaginative strength. And sometimes in the harsh verse there come passages of delicate poetry, as in the description of the Earth-Mother in Book V., and of springtime in Britain in Book VI. It is not a work on which it is possible to pass any clear judgment. All we can say is that Mr. Doughty is beyond doubt a poet, not altogether skilled in his art, but highly dowered with the essential qualities of imagination and passion.

To turn to the next two writers, whose collected works have been published, is to turn from a rough primitive force to an accomplished talent. Mr. Sturge Moore seeks simplicity, and in the main achieves it. His themes are chiefly taken from classical bypaths, and the tradition he follows is that modern classicism made fashionable by Matthew Arnold. To our mind, his earlier poems are his best,—" The Centaur's Booty" and "The Rout of the Amazons," where he gives a freer rein to his fancy, and can dedicate his talents to a patient and exquisite delineation of natural beauty. In his later work he is apt to fall into strained conceits—such as his description of Leda swimming as a "snow-white plough" in the crystal furrow—and he devotes too much space to the lyric, which is not the form best suited to his genius. The lack of passion and variety in music, which

* (1) The Daum in Britain. By Charles M. Doughty. 2 vols. London Duck- worth and Co. [48. 65. net each.] —(2) Poems. By T. Sturge Moore. Same publishers. l6s.j—(3) The Collected Poems of 'Wilfred Campbell. London : Fleming H. Revell Company. 6s. net.]—(4( The Door of Humility. By Alfred Austin. London Macmillan and Co. 4s. 6d. net.]—(5) Augustine the Han. By Amelie Rives (Princess Troubetz oy). London : John Lane. [5s. net.]—(6) Nicephorus a Tragedy of New Rome. By Frederic Harrison. London Chapman and Hall. [5s. net.]—(7) Paris and (Eno's& By Laurence Binyon. London : A. Constable and Co. Ds. net.}-.—(8) Nimrod the Builder. By Harold Elsdale Goad. London : ReganPaul, Trench, and Co. [3s. 65. net.] —(9) Corydon an Elegy. By Reginald Faushawe. London : H. Frowde. [4€. 65. net.]—(10) Love's Testament: a Sonnet Sequence. By G. Constant Lounsbery. London : John Lane. 3s. net.)— (11) Poems. By Aurelian. London Elkin Mathews. [1s. net. —(12) Dramatic Lyrics. B John Gurdon. Same publisher. [3g. 6d. ne. . J—(13) The Rushlight. By Seosamb MseCathmhaoil. Dublin : Maunsel and Co. [2s. 6d. net.]

is not felt in his descriptive poems, is apt to make his lyrics a little flat. Sometimes, however, as in a poem like "The Gazelles," he writes Buell a song as Blake might have written. In days when poetry suffers from too much rhetoric Mr. Sturge Moore's clean-cut sincerity is a grateful and refreshing thing to contemplate.

Mr. Wilfred Campbell, in many ways the foremost living Canadian poet, belongs to a very different school. There is nothing jewelled, or polished, or highly wrought in his verses. He writes because of a great impulse to sing about many things,—full-hearted, high-spirited poetry, often trite and imitative, but always marked by indomitable vigour. In his particular metrical style, as well as in his philosophy of life, he reminds one of Longfellow. He is at his best in his descriptions of his beautiful homeland, and certainly no country is better fitted than Canada to inspire a poet. Such a poem as "A Northern River" is as delightful in form as it is fresh in inspiration ; and in the narration of some incident in his country's history, such as " Unabsolved," he shows a sense of human drama as strong as his feeling for natural beauty. Mr. Campbell is too genuine a Canadian not to be a true citizen, and some of his patriotic verses are as good as anything we have seen of the kind. We may quote as an instance the poem called "The Answer"

"They whisper that you are dying, Mother of mine and me: Like a sick old eagle crying Out of the northern sea :

But we answer, mother, 0 mother, Back to thy breast we come, We of thy breed and seed and none other From the beat of the alien drum.

Loud was the new world song That wooed and beckoned and won;

Long was the day, and long The roads of water and sun;

But after the alien dream, After the alien tongue ;— Sweet to creep to the true, to the old, To the love that ever is young."

With Mr. Campbell's work we may join the Poet-Laureate's new volume, The Door of Humility, since both writers deal largely with matters of contemporary interest. The poet in Mr. Austin's work is perplexed in youth with some obvious theological doubts, and his lady refuses him till he comes to a better frame of mind. He straightway proceeds upon a kind of Grand Tour, which gives him the opportunity to describe elaborately Switzerland, Rome, Greece, and other places. After much trite metaphysical speculation he arrives at a sort of solution, and returns home to find his lady repentant. Humility, the poem teaches, is the only gateway to truth. We have no wish to be unkind to a writer who is so transparently ingenuous and well-meaning, and we readily admit that he is not without his felicities. The description of Florence, for example, is done in exceedingly melodious verse. Our complaint is that he has nothing to say, and that a work whose moral is-

" Nor need you then seek, far and near, More sumptuous shrines on alien strand, But with domestic mind revere The Ritual of your native land,"

was scarcely worth writing.

The poetic drama has not of late been cultivated with much success in England, but the four volumes before us all show a high level of achievement. The best is Amelie Rives's

Augustine the Man, in which the struggle of the saint after conversion between his devotion to Christ and his love for his former mistress and his son is displayed with insight and sympathy. The blank verse is not the mere vehicle of the tale, but the work of a genuine poet. We greatly prefer Mr. Frederic Harrison's treatment of the tragedy of Nice- phorus and Theophano in his new play, Nieephorus, to the treatment of the same tale in his novel, Theophano. The splendid figure of the soldier made Emperor against his will, consumed with a passion for the defence of Christendom and no less torn with love for the Empress, living according to his own high ideal of duty and dying at last for his dream, is represented with real dramatic power. Especially fine is the closing scene where the old Marshals of Nicephortts return to their allegiance, and Theophano's wickedness recoils on her own head. Mr. Harrison in his preface tells us that the play is designed for the stage, and certainly it seems to us to have all the qualities of a good acting play. Mr. Laurence Binyon's one-act tragedy of Pat-is and CEnone tells the tale of the deserted nymph of Ida to whom Paris returns, wounded and dying, to seek healing. She refuses him, and- then repents too late when he is already laid on his pyre. The contrast between IEnone's deathless love and the selfish passion of Helen makes a fine close to the play. As in all Mr. Binyon's work, there is the charm of perfect taste and a scrupulous and delicate fancy. Mr. Goad calls his Nimrod the Builder an allegory. It tells of the attempt of Nimrod and the children of Ham to create for themselves a material heaven on earth, as compared with the spiritual creed of the children of Shem. The conception shows considerable imaginative power, and the verse, which tends to be monotonous, rises now and then to the true dignity of poetry.

The remaining volumes on our list are concerned with less ambitious forms. The first two, Mr. Reginald Fanshawe's Corydon and Mr. Lounsbery's Love's Testament, show metrical skill and a cultivated taste, but little inspiration. Mr. Fan- shawe, greatly daring, has chosen to write an elegy on Matthew Arnold in the metre of Adondis, and to discuss therein the various phases of development which Oxford has gone through. He is a little inclined to a surfeit of epithets, but his verse is orderly and musical, and he expresses gracefully many genuine, if not very startling, truths. Mr. Lounsbery's sonnet sequence we find less successful. To write a multitude of sonnets on love a man must have a greater subtlety of thought and feeling than falls to the author's share. The little volume of poems by " Aurelian " consists mainly of slight songs on flowers and jewels, the catches of wayward moods, all of them melodious, but none of them with that touch of the unforget- table which is the lyrical ideal. Mr. Gurdon's Dramatic Lyrics show scholarship, a fine ear for harmonies, and a luxuriant fancy. There is an echo of Mr. Swinburne,—very pleasant to our ear in an age when his "mighty line" is little imitated. Mr. Gurdon is still rather in the experimental stage of his art, but he has force and daring, and such a poem as "The Flutes of Death" gives promise of a talent which may rise to a high rank. His lyrics are not the thin-drawn academical exercises we are too familiar with, but the work of a man who can think and feel. Last comes a slim little book bound in brown holland called The Rushlight. The songs are all of simple things,—peasant girls in Ireland, the fairies, old tales, the exile's longing for home, the quiet life of the hills. Among the highly accomplished verse we have been considering they stand out like wild daffodils and cornflowers amid rather shrivelled and pallid flowers. For this little book has the authentic note of poetry. The catches have the true lilt of the sea or the hills ; the odd fancies are never merely literaiy, but always spring from the heart of things; the simplicity is the simplicity of life, and not a mannerism. So long as the author can keep so closely in touch with Nature and natural joys he will never lack readers. For, as the writer of Ecclesiasticus wrote, "the eye desireth favour and beauty, but more than these green sown fields."