SIR J. NOEL PATON'S POEMS.*

• Spindrift. By Sir Noel Paton. tendon: Blackwood.

Sin Nom PATON'S verses arc generally pleasant to read, con- taining often true lyrical feeling and now and then a real touch of imaginative force, though this is oftener the case, we think, in the treatment of the old classical subjects than of those of modern themes. All the pieces in this volume embodying a single idea are • far superior to those which either, like those following Shelley's attempt to impersonate the genius of the "Cloud," imitated closely by Sir Noel Paton in the "mine of the Golden Hour," or like the short novel in verse which is the principal poem of the book, require either a certain elasticity and play of lyrical feeling, or, on the other hand, a dramatic breadth of insight. There are men of poetical feeling,—and Sir Noel Paton seems to us one of them,. —who have just poetical vitality enough for one single concep- tion at a time, but who never attempt to draw out their feelings, either into the various phases of a narrative, or the changeful keys and melodies of an ode, without failing either to keep fast the unity in difference, or to distinguish sufficiently the differences in unity, which are the conditions of a good poem. Some of Sir It Paton's sonnets and one or two of his classical poems seem to us very graceful, and far the best of his poetical efforts.

"Perdita," the longest poem in the volume,—a narrative poem, as the title indicates, on the fall of a woman,—has some very pretty passages descriptive of Nile scenery and of personal emo- tion, but nothing that can be called real imaginative force in it: It is intended to be written something in the bitter ironic tone of

Tennyson's Maud, by a man utterly disgusted with the conven- tional morality of his day, and frequently turning aside from his painful story to burst out into a sort of savage jeer ; but savage jeering does not suit Sir N. Paton's talent ; there is a ring of special

weakness in these taunts, beyond and above the general weakness which the sardonic style of poetry, even in such a poet as Tenny- son, almost always contains. Perdita, the heroine of the poem, falls in love with the narrator of the story, and he with her, and they are thwarted by the intervention of the gentleman described in the following verses :—

" Swift passed the hours, as hours will pass With youth and love linked hand-in-hand; Time, crowned with roses, shook his glass, With nectar flowing, not with sand.

"Till one day a Viscount arrived from the south, A cousin, or something, to banker Toots: A small grey man with foxy mouth, A padded waistcoat and stridulous boots ; "A sneering nostril, an eye like glass, Whose look was an insult: as though it said, 'Of course you are either rogue or ass, For all men rank under either head !'

"His wealth was unbounded, not so his wit.

Broad were his acres, but narrow his views ; As I ventured to tell him across the Lafitte: A betise, no doubt ; but I did not choose

" To fall down and worship, as they seemed to do (Not she though), their beggarly golden calf,— Their pinchbeck noble ; nor swallow, in lien Of grain, his mildewed conventional chaff."

This seems to us, we confess, very fifth-rate satire indeed, which degenerates almost into vulgarity when the marriage comes off:—

" Well, ere next April's moon had rolled Its course, the 'joyous' marriage-bells Proclaimed the poor young creature sold— Sold, soul and body, at All-Swells.'

"But a Christian bishop performed the rite ; And ladies great of spotless fame, And three live lords of mickle might— In short, the very creme de la crime,

"As 'Jenkins' phrased it—came to bear Their part in the splendid sacrifice, And drink long life' to the happy pair In choice champagne sublimed in ice.

"And over all his wide domains (Each bought a bargain,' safe and clear !) The noble British peasant drains Their health in noble British beer.

"And tradesmen (noble British) dress Their 'fronts' in greens, and bunting gay That flaunts its gaudiest, to express Their joy on this auspicious' day."

" All-Swells " is, we suppose, a satirical name for St. George's, Hanover Square. But we should doubt the depth of the passion- ate regret that could find any satisfaction in that facetious nick- name. There are better things, however, in the poem, but they are all incidental touches in it, and not those intended to bring out the shame and sorrow of the story. Especially the suggestion that Homer may have been a sailor is one of true poetical insight into the Homeric poetry in which there is a "voice of many waters," that we do not remember to have seen elsewhere :—

". . . . All the gathered woe Of years—the shame, the fear—had fled,

"As, through the gusty Cyclades, We tacked and veered, day after day ; Fanned by the same JEgman breeze, That wont in Homer's locks to play.

"'While, the great Epos yet unsung, He trimmed the sail or plied the oar, A keen-eyed mariner, bold and young, Roving from sunny shore to shore."

Do not both the vivid life, and the patient detail with which Homer tells the old myths, suggest a coasting mariner's graphic and slowly mellowing yarn ? "Perdita," however, is by no means the best of Sir Noel Paton's productions. The young lady has not life enough given her to interest us very deeply, in spite of her tragic story, and the ineffectual young gentleman who tells it, and who is apt to swoon at wrong moments, interests us still less.

" Actzeon in Hades" is, we think, by far the best of these poems, though the form of it constantly reminds us of Mr. Tennyson's CEnone, especially the refrain addressed to Acheron, "Hearken, thou dolorous river of the dead," "Hear me, dim river, for the time is short," which is almost an echo of "Dear mother Ida, hearken ere I die." That, however, is a mere matter of form. The story is quite distinct from CEnone's, and conceived with real force and beauty. It is not one indeed which has any human reality for us, which the story of CEnone, like all Tennyson's studies in classical literature (that of a true woman neglected for a goddess), certainly has. But for that very reason, the beauty and interest which Sir N. Paton has managed to impart to it are the more striking. The story of a fierce hunter, moon-struck, deprived of his manliness, transformed by the stern beauty of Artemis into a hunted deer pursued by his own hounds for having rashly gazed upon her in her chosen solitude, is not one that has any particular significance for modern feeling. If it means anything to us, it is only a parabolic mode of indicating the susceptibility of rough, wild natures to the influence of a certain exquisitely severe form of purity and beauty, and the tendency there may be in the too abrupt collision of the two widely separated elements of nature to strike with insanity the victim in whom they struggle for the victory. But of this there is no trace in Sir N. Paton's poem. He makes Actteon, before as well as after the vision of Artemis in her loveliness, a man open to the warmer and more delicate emotions, which would, on our interpretation of the myth, be an error. Not the less has he made a poem of his subject which takes a certain real hold of the imagina- tion :—

- "I listened, hunter-wise

Against the wind ; and softly to my feet Uprising, drew the pleached boughs aside, Forth peering, and with javelin in hand Descended,—by the enchanted echoes led, My stanch hounds following,—round me as I trod

Showering the wild-rose petals and rathe blooms Of honey-bine, through bedded hyacinths Knee-deep, and root-entangled undergrowth, To where a laurel thicket overlooks The lone Gargaphian fountain, deep embowered Within the silence of the woods. And there, 0 hearken, awful River of the Dead !

Disrobed, unbuskined—quiver and bow thrown by, Under the emerald shade of vaulted boughs And pensile trail of cistus and wild vine- Breast-deep in the green wave ; or stretched at rest, Half hid in asphodels and melilote, Beside their gleaming garments and their hounds, I saw the nymphs of Artemis !--lithe-limbed, Small-bosomed, rosy-brown with sylvan toil.

And, taller by the shoulders, in their midst, White, slender, luminous as the crescent moon,

Seen in the purple depths of twilight air—

Lo ! the incarnate Splendour, the divine, Unsullied Presence of the Huntress Queen!

Upon the fountain-marge, straight as a spear,

She stood in lustrous shadow ; but the light,—

Shot upwards from the water,—o'er her limbs, O'er her ambrosial bosom, and o'or her hair, That brightly veiled her, as a golden mist Veils but not hides a star—rippled and played In glimmering disks and wavering rings of gold,

"She nor blushed nor stirred ;

But drawn to all her godlike height, her eyes, Intolerable, inevitable, fierce As hate, and beautiful as heaven ! she bent Full upon mine. Blind frenzy stung my brain : Swift agony, as of a thousand shafts Of arrowy fire, maddened my hurrying blood. I turned and fled ; and as I fled my shape Changed like a monstrous dream : my forehead felt The antlers' weight : each human lineament Roughened into the brute : and the strong heart, To which the name of fear had been unknown, Melted within me."

That is good, because it embodies so well the conception of that peculiar keenness and cold severity of beauty which connected the Artemis of mythology with the shafts of her lunar light. It is the cold glance of her unflinching eye that transforms Adman into a moon-struck chase. Actmon's personal emotions are not nearly so good as his vision. Sir N. Paton's conceptions of form and colour, more especially of the former, seem to us far superior to his de- scriptions of feeling, and sometimes thoroughly statuesque.

Of the Latter, i.e., of passionate poetry, there is not much in this volume which pleases us, but of those thoughtful and medi- tative forms of feeling which are most perfectly expressed in the "sonnet" there are one or two of considerable beauty. Take the following, for example, in which the only fault perhaps is the old-fashioned phraseology (" surcease "), of which Sir N. Paton is very fond, and which always conveys to our minds a certain for- mality and slight unreality of tone :—

" What time the flaming arrows of the dawn Scatter the starry cohorts of the night, And in her leafy covert far withdrawn Warbles the nightingale her soul's delight,— From golden visions of my love I start— As some spent wanderer stretched on Libyan sand Wakes, with sick pause and tumult of the heart, From dreams of fountains in a flowery land, Yet raises not his eyes—because he knows Nor stream nor shade through all the desert lorn May greet them. So against the light I close My desolate eyes, because henceforth nor morn Nor eve, through all the desert years, may bring, Now She is lost, surcease of sorrowing," Sir N. Paton's love of obsolete or eccentric phraseology will be an annoyance to some readers,—is to us, we confess,—the title itself is an oddity,—all through the book. " Scritch " (p. 43), for "shrink," we do not know at all, and it is lugged into a really silly verse to make a rhyme for a word which is itself a silly one in its context. "Spry" for "spray" is quite obsolete. " Selcouth" for "rare," which is Spenserian, we think, and occurs twice in this volume, has no special expression of its own, and sounds like an affectation. " Gurge," from gurges, for a "whirlpool," is Miltonian, but pompous. " Vading " for " disappearing " or " vanishing " is Spenserian again, but very needless in its place, and antique, we suppose, by preference. " Haps " for " covers " (we conjecture) we have never seen before. And " materteral " for "aunt-She," the feminine of avuncular, is at least a grotes- querie. Sir N. Paton has a certain pleasure in the oddity of obsolete words which to us disturbs the gentle flow of his verse. Still many of his verses have genuine beauty, of a mild visionary kind,

and there is no trace of real insincerity or affectation in his pleasant volume.