Studies in Verse.. By Charles Grant. (John Pearson.)—These verses have
a good deal of feeling in them, but they want strength. There is simplicity, nature, at times some music in them, but even the best seem to fall short of the- impression they were intended to make, and ought -to make if they were, for the reader, the poems that they evidently were in the mind of the writer. We rather prefer the studies of child- hood contained here to those of more mature moods. This, for in- stance, has humour as well as nature in it :— " Grown up people are so stupid,
Dolly dear, Now sit still and don't be frighten'd, No one's near.
"And they will not come to fetch us; They will call ;— Well, rm out of patience with them, One and all.
"There's papa now ;—if he wish'd it He might play, Yet he reads, and writes, and ciphers All the day.
"Ant mamma, when no one's looking, You should see.
Only takes one lump of sugar In her tea.
"Now if I were big, Miss Dolly, Do you think I wonld look at nasty paper, Pens, and Ink?
"I would scamper through the greenhouse, Chace the cat, And I'd live on sugar-candy, Think of that:"
The poems on the unsuccessful Polish insurrection have some force in them, but even they fall short of the measure needed for their subject. That Mr. Grant has a vein of pure poetic: feeling in him we gladly recognise, but he wants, at present, concentrative force.
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