MR. PAYNE'S NEW POEMS.*

MR. PAYNE'S volume has left on our mind a profound impres- sion of melancholy. But it is not the melancholy which the poet wishes, it would seem, to produce in the minds of his readers. With him, the times are indeed "out of joint," and be does his best to make us all feel that they are. He tells us with doleful iteration that " songs and singers are out of date." He looks back to a golden age, when love, and honour, and faith, and all other noble gifts and qualities, now, alas ! banished from the earth, still flourished. He does not tell us, indeed, the date of this vanished time of goodness and beauty. If we were to hazard a guess, we should be disposed to place it somewhere about the fourteenth century, or perhaps a little later, when Italy, finding a new gospel in revived letters, became the home, if not of the virtues, at least of the graces. Nor are we able quite to identify the love and honour and faith whose departure he deplores with the prosaic and common-place notions of those things with which we are fami- liar in these degenerate days. The love might run no little risk of being called lust, the honour might be thought not to have much to do with honesty, and the faith nothing at all to do with belief. But, however this may be, Mr. Payne sings for • New Poems. By John Payne. London : Newman and Co. 1880.

the most part in a minor key, and would have his hearers pos- sessed, we presume, with the appropriate emotion. But what has really saddened us has been to find a volume of really beau- tiful verse, modulated with quite exquisite skill, and adorned

with a marvellous wealth of the richest word-painting, of varied imagery, and delicate fancy, with scarcely one single true and manly thought in it, from beginning to end. The age, bicuriosa suorum, as Mr. Payne believes it to be, has yet given him

encouragement to produce several volumes of verse. Nor do we wonder that it should have been given. In one way he fully deserves it. He has many of the gifts of a true poet. But why could he not have given to a generation which is not so deaf to music and blind to beauty as lie seems to think, something better worthy of admiration ? These doleful ditties, tuneful as are the numbers to which they are sung, these melodious com- plaints of an age which the poet has not found inappreciative of any gifts that lie may have, these regretful lc,okings-back to days which he knows iu his heart to have been very brutal and material, are not worthy of a man of real power. It is not thus that great names have been won, not thus that men have been enrolled by the voice of their own age and the ages after them in that honourable company, the " Sacii vates, et Phoebo digna soniti."

We will take the chief poem of this volume, "Salvestra," and analyse it, not without sonic apology to our readers for what we thus present to their notice. It begins with the usual complaint that we are fallen upon evil days, the usual praise of better times departed, when,— " Love was high and was the Lord of Life.

From Venice-turrets unto Algarsife, All held fair deeds and lovely worshipful, And all were scholars in Love's gracious school.

Then men (lid honour Love with heart and soul, Setting their lives upon his smile or frown ; For in their hearts his altar-flame was whole, And burnt unchanged until Life's sun went down.

Love was the flower of life and honour's crown, Wherewith men perfumed all the weary years, And purged the air from mean and sordid fears."

We hasten on, impatient to know more of the sweetness, and tenderness, and purity of a life which is worthy of such praise, and this is what we find. The son of a merchant prince of Florence loves passionately his foster-sister, the daughter of a clothworker, an incomparable beauty, on whose loveliness the poet lavishes all his power of description. At first everything runs smoothly enough, but the young man's haughty mother overhears the lovers talking together ; and having very different views for her son, contrives a plan for their separation.

The young man is sent abroad on his travels ; Paris, it is hoped, will wean him from his folly. There he drags out two weary years. Meanwhile, Salvestra, who has never really reciprocated the ardent passion of her lover, marries a mau of her own station, and is a very happy and contented wife. Girolamo- that is the lover's name—returns to Florence, discovers the dreadful truth, and falls into an almost fatal sickness. So far, the story is of a kind made familiar enough to us by novels with- out end. Now comes the variation which is distinctive of the golden age of Mr. Payne's regrets. Barely recovered of his sickness, Girolamo finds his way into Salvestra's house, hides himself in her chamber, and sees her disrobe. At this point, Mr. Payne feels that the time is come for the invocation of powers greater than his *own. Just as the poet of the iEneid, when he is about to enter on what he felt to be the real subject of his epic, Italy and the great struggle out of which was to come Imperial Rome, invokes the help of the Muse, so does the writer of " Salvestra." He cries,—

" I would I could command his lyre of gold,

That sang that Marie loved of Chastelard, Or his full harp, that of fair Nyssia told, Guarding her jealous beauty like a star,

Or else his silver late, whose ladies are- Florise and Cypris and that Goddess briulit That leads the silver lapses of the night."

Shortly, Salvestra lies down in the bed where her husband is already sleeping the sleep of toil. After a while, Girolamo wakes her, and tells his love. She explains that she is very happy with her husband. This is a death-stroke to him. He has now but one request to make :—

" He did entreat of her one little prayer Of his to grant and lighten his despair ;— That she would let him in the conch, beside Her warm body, 9. little while abide ;—

For all the heat had left him, with the chill Of the night-air,—and swore to her to lie Silent by her nor touch her, but quite still And mate to bide the while ;—and presently

(He did avouch) before the day drew nigh, As soon as be regained a little heat,

He would arise and go with noiseless feet."

But this promise of departure he does not fulfil, but dies in- stead. Dead Salvestra finds him, in the morning. She breaks the matter to her husband, by telling what has happened as a dream. He seems quite content, and good-naturedly carries the body to the palace of Girolamo's mother. Thence it is trans-

ported to the cathedral, and to the cathedral Salvestra goes, at her husband's bidding, to hear "what talk might be among the folk around ;" and then,— "Love took revenge of his contemned law."

All the fruitless passion which the dead man had felt comes upon her, and as he had died for love of her, so she dies for love of him.

Our readers will probably have recognised one of the stories

of the Decameron. There, in that strange picture of an age dissolute beyond any that the world had seen since the days of

the later Caesars, it is not out of place. But can a poet of the nineteenth century find no better subject ? Is it worth while to spend so much power, and the power it would be difficult to exaggerate, on a subject—to say nothing of its morality—so unreal and so grotesque ? It might have been a fit topic for the pleadings in a " Court of Love." Is it not now wholly out of place ?

The other long poem, "Thorgerda," is a subject from the Scandinavian mythology. Thorgerda is a beautiful fairy, whom the love of a mortal wins for a time from her task of working mischief to man. We cannot say that the poem pleases us, but it is at least free from the false and sickly sentiment of " Salvestra."

The remainder of Mr. Payne's New Poems is made up of

" ballads," and " virela,ys," " rondeaux redoubles," and " rondels," and so forth, all modulated, almost without exception, with exquisite skill, but wanting in purpose and vigour of thought. It would be unreasonable to ask that all the work of a poet should be serious and full of meaning. We should be very glad to have so skilful an artist as Mr. Payne give us now and then specimens of his art, without inquiring whether what he sang had any special significance. We should be satisfied to find his verse melodious and tender, full of graceful imagery and exquisitely turned. But this does not satisfy us, if we have nothing else.

It would not be fair, however, to Mr. Payne, if we did not give our readers some opportunities of judging of the really great poetical gifts which he has. Here is an exquisite little sylvan scene :—

" Full of bird-song and scent of forest-flowers The coppice was, and very sweet and cool In the hot noontide were its trellised bowers,

Set by the glass of some dream-haunted pool,

Whereon the sleepy sweetness of the lull Of silence brooded ; and its every glen Was set with purple of the cyclamen " Or starred with white of amaryllis blooms,

Pale flower-dreams of the virginal green sward, That made faint sweetness in the emerald glooms : And through the stillness ever rose and soared The song of some up-mounting lark, that poured The gold of his delight for rose-hung June Into the channel of a perfect tune."

And here is something which, if we began our review with melancholy, may bring it to an end with something more cheerful:—

"MADRIGAL GAI.

The summer-sunshine comes and goes ; The bee hums in the heart of the rose : Heart of my hope, the year is sweet; The lilies lighten about thy feet.

A new light glitters on land and sea ; The turtles couple on every tree.

Light of my life, the fields are fair ; Gossamers tangle thy golden hair.

The air with kisses is blithe and gay ; Love is so sweet in the middle May.

Sweet of my soul, the brook is blue ; Thine eyes with heaven have pierced it through.

Now is the time for kisses, now When bird-songs babble from every bough !

Sweetest, my soul is a bird that sips

Honey of heaven from out thy lips."