BOOKS.

• A COUNTRY MUSE.* MERE is another minor poet whose music is as true and -delicate as the sound which proceeds from the convolutions of the shell when pressed against the ear, and whose sense of colour is as pure as the soft tints of the same shell as it -shades away from the pink of a fair sunset to the faintest flush in which the last trace of the sun can be discerned. We have no notion who Mr. Norman Gale may be, but we are Lure of this, that several of the poetical reputations of the

. .4 Country Mime. 13y Norman R. Gale. Loniou : David Nutt.. 1892,

earliest part of this century,—Henry Kirke White's, for example,—were founded upon work none of which could com- pare in exquisiteness of conception and execution to the poem addressed "To a Nest of Young Thrashes," which stands second amongst the poems of this minute volume. Lest our readers should think that we are the subject of a fond illusion, we will quote at once the first stanzas of this beautiful little poem, and ask them if it would be possible to open a poet's conversation with a nest of just-fledged birds with a tenderer and truer playfulness, or a sweeter music, than the following lines embody :—

"Dear little birds, you're ready now to fly, But just a. word before you say 'Good-bye,' And flash across the stately fields of rye To flit afar !

Sit in a line upon that wild-rose spray, And pay attention to the things I say, Which will not last until the dying day And evening star.

You yonder, by that angry-looking thorn, Clean wings and breast to-morrow, neither scorn The sage advice of very long years born And thin grey hairs !

And you that perch the nearest to my face Please have the modesty and courtly grace To check that coming song—'tis not the place For evening prayers.

Now, little thrushes, shall we not begin Before the stonechat's clink so crisp and thin Ere larks hang o'er us with that lovely din We heard last night Sit still, my pretty ones, for now's the time To sip of wisdom ere the winter rime Freeze summer hearts and hush the laughing chime Once loud and bright."

There is hardly a verse in the whole, which extends to eighteen of these stanzas, which is not quite as good as the three we have quoted. There is the same fine, true touch like the touch of the artist who carves a. perfect cameo, in all of them, and the same spritely and gentle laughter, as of a happy heart, breathing through all. We found many other beautiful things in the little book, but hardly any quite so beautiful as the lines to the nest of young thrashes. But Mr. Gale's heart seems always to be with the birds. There is only about seventy times as much verse in the whole volume as the three stanzas we have already quoted ; but of that, quite the best part, and indeed, we think, also the most part, concerns the birds. Of course there is a good deal of love-poetry of the ordinary kind, some of it very beautiful, but none of it, we think, quite so delicately lovely as the love-poetry addressed to birds.

" Ah ! let me live among the birds and bloom

Of hazel copses and enchanted woods, Till death shall toll me to the common tomb,"

says Mr. Gale ; and so far as this little volume affords any evidence, that is precisely where he does live. And apparently he would not only live but die in the same fair region of artless song and innocent rapture, for here is his picture, not only of the life but death of Nature's " priest : "—

"Nature and he went ever hand in hand Across the hills and down the lonely lane ; They captured starry shells upon the strand And lay enchanted by the musing main. So She, who loved him for his love of her, Made him the heir to traceries and signs On tiny children nigh too small to stir In great green plains of hazel leaf or vines. She taught the trouble of the nightingale ; Revealed the velvet secret of the rose ; She breathed divinity into his heart, That rare divinity of watching those Slow growths that make a nettle learn to dart The puny poison of its little throes.

Her miracles of motion, butterflies, .

Rubies and sapphires skimming lily-crests, Carved on a yellow petal with their eyes *Pranced by the beauty of their powdered breasts, Seen in the mirror of a drop of dew He loved as friends and as a hien(' he knew. The dust of gold and scarlet underwings More precious was to him than nuggets tern From all invaded treasure-crypts of Time, And ev:ry floating, painted, silver beam Drew him to roses where it stayed to dream, Or down sweet avenues of scented lime.

And Nature trained him tenderly to know The rain of melodies in coverts heard. Let him hut catch the cadences that flow From hollybush or lilac, elm or sloe,

And he would snake the music with the bird. The faintest song a redstart ever song

Was redstart's piping, and the whitethroat knew

No cunning trill, no mazy shake that rang Doubtful on ears unaided by the view.

But in his glory, as a young pure priest In that great temple, only roofed by stars, An angel hastened from the sacred East To reap tho wisest and to leave the least.

And as he moaned upon the couch of death, Breathing away his little share of breath, All suddenly he sprang upright in bed ! Life, like a ray, poured fresh into his face, Flooding the hollow cheeks with passing grace.

He listened long, then pointed up above ;

Laughed a low laugh of boundless joy and love— That was a plover called, he softly said,

And on his wife's breast fell, serenely dead !"

Carlyle, who, great genius as he was, was a very poor critic, —witness his extraordinarily arrogant and false criticism on both Sir Walter Scott and Charles Lamb,—never said a more utterly mistaken thing than that the day of verse was over, and that nothing which was good in verse, could not be expressed equally well in prose. There was a good deal, and a good deal that was imaginative, and now and then

even poetical, in its essence, which he himself could say better in prose than he could ever have said it in verse; but then,

that was on aecount of the natural wilfulness and rugged- ness of his own nature. There is a kind both of pride and of humility which can never utter itself adequately except under the laws of rhythm ; and the truer the humility, the more certain it will be that it will delight not only in rhythm but in rhyme. Milton's grand organ-tones rolled out most proudly rather in rhythm than in rhyme. Of his finest poetry, only perhaps the "II Penseroso," " L'Allegro," " Lycidas," and the "Ode to the Nativity"• are rhymed ; but without rhythm he could never have expressed that feeling for grandeur of purpose, that

sense of time and tide and a mighty harmony in the universe, which gives its majesty to his verse. Directly he began to write in prose, his grandeur descended into pompousness, his magnificence became elaborately sensuous and rhetorical, and his violence betrayed itself in stilted in- vective. But the poets in whom humility is as deep as their sense of beauty,—in whom, indeed, humility is part and parcel of their sense of beauty,—are always at their best in rhymed verse, and often in rhymed verse of a very delicate texture. Sometimes, indeed, the prouder poets love, like Byron, a rather complex form of verse ; but then the complexity is apt to have a certain artificial ring about it, and one sees the ostentation with which the master of language uses, and displays his command over, an elaborately difficult medium. But, for the most part, the poets who show a rare felicity in the subtleties of rhyme, are poets to whom a humble delight in tracing out and following closely the more delicate harmonies of the universe, is natural. Take Wordsworth, who, well as he knew the secret of fine blank verse, was seldom at his very highest except in rhyme, in poems like the great "Ode on Intimations of Immortality," or the "Song at the Feast of Brougham Castle," or the lines "To a Solitary Reaper," or those "To a Cuckoo." The same may be said of Cole- ridge and of his son Hartley, and of Keats and Shelley, and Matthew Arnold and Tennyson. There is strength for the poet in the very humility of the attempt to find out some- thing of the finer refrains in Nature, and to reflect them in his verse. We have been reminded of this by Mr. Gale's delicate little poems. The verse has a simplicity which is yet full of subtlety, and a subtlety which is full of simplicity. What can be happier, for instance, than this graceful and gracious little song on the three stages of life ?—

" First the fine, faint, dreamy motion Of the tender blood

Circling in the veins of children— This is Life, the bud.

Next the fresh, advancing beauty Growing from the gloom, Waking eyes and fuller bosom— This is Life, the bloom.

Then the pain that follows after, Grievous to be borne,

Pricking, steeped in subtle poison— This is Love, the thorn."

And what can be fuller of true gaiety than the poem called

"A Country Dance." Or take as an example, the beautiful little poem on "A Thrush in Seven Dials," where, we venture

to say, the happy mixture of sunshine and sadness could not have been expressed at all without both rhythm and rhyme% We take as specimen only a couple of verses :—

" 'Twas when these urchins flocked around

That most forgetful of her cage Her wildwood carrollings she found

Warm in her heart, untouched by age I So, sitting on her perch she sang Marsh-marigolds and river-sand Till all the grimy district rang With tales of moss and meadowland.

And then for days she would not shake A single utterance from her store Despite the outcast imps who swim Like Oliver and asked for more ! In fluffy listlessness she sat And dreamed of all the grassy west—. How she had feared the parson's cat, And how she built her earliest nest!"

Mr. Norman Gale may not prove, probably will not prove, a great poet ; but we suspect that he will stand by the side of Buchanan's friend, David Gray, as one of the many poets of the nineteenth century who have found in poetry the true- expression of a deep and humble love of natural beauty.