Sketches in Verse. By M. O. Strachey. With a Foreword
by Frederic Harrison. Illustrated. (Oxford : B. H. Blackwell. 3s. net.) All who love Italy, and who feel starved by their inability to see with their natural eyes Tivoli or Taormina, the Villa d'Ests, or any other part of the peninsula, from Palermo to Rapallo, will be grate- ful to the author of Sketches in Verse, for her little volume leads them by many an Italian pathway. We hear the splash of Italian fountains set in gardens where tall cypresses keep an outpost Una for the marble gods and fauns that occupy their terraces, lawns. and stairways. Mr. Frederic Harrison, in the Foreword which he has contributed to the book, puts this point with that charm of style which is peculiarly his own :—
"When all the sweetest haunts of our people on the Continent are closed to us—and alas I for reasons that we can imagine, may long remain unvisited—it will be soothing to recall soft visions of some of those sacred havens of rest, where we have so often found refreshment to the wearied spirit."
As a rule, photographs, and especially photographs of scenery, make the worst possible illustrations for a book. In the present case, however, the critical bibliophile will more than pardon their crudity since they raise memories so many and so happy. To the present writer perhaps the best of these is that named " Rapallo." It stands for all rural Italy. The little seventeenth-century chapel, in spite of its thinness, its cheap stucco, its utter carelessness in construction, somehow contains in it the whole charm of Italian architecture. The shoulder of mountain behind and the stone path in front recall a thousand scenes amid Italian hills. Before we leave Sketches in Verse we should like to express agreement with Mr. Frederic Harrison in hie commendation of the translation of " Hadrian's Address to his Soul." It is very claw:—
" Sweet wayward soul, playful and gay, Comrade and guest of this poor clay, Ah ! where will now be thine abode ? All pallid, naked, cold, alone ; Thy wonted, happy jestings gone."
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