MR. BENSON'S POEMS.* IT is Nature rather than man, or

the life of man, that chiefly occupies Mr. Benson in the volume of poems now before us. He watches and notes with the keen eye of a lover every change in her varying mood, every little trait of her multitu- dinous life. How closely he watches her will be seen by the following verses, which are almost Tennysonian in their delicate minuteness of observation :—

" Our Or WEAKNESS.

To-day, as far as eye can see, Or thought can multiply the sight, In tangled croft, on upland lea, A message flashed along the light Has worked strange marvels underground,

And stirred a million sleeping cells,

The rose has hopes of being crowned ; The foxglove dreams of purple bells ; No tiny life that blindly strives, But thinks the impulse all his own, Nor dreams that countless other lives Like him, are groping, each alone ; What dizzy sweetness, when the rain Has wept her fill of laden showers, To peep across the teeming plain, Through miles of upward-springing flowers The brown seed bursts his armoured cap, And slips a white-veined arm between, White juicy stalks, a touch would snap, And twisted horns of sleekest green Now shift and turn from side to side, And fevered drink the stealing rain, As children fret at sermon-tide, When roses kiss the leaded pane.

The tender, the resistless grace, That stirs the hopes of sleeping flowers, Could shake yon fortress to her base, And splinter those imperial towers; Concentred, bound, obedient, The soul that lifts those dreaming lids Could mock old Ramses' monument, And pile a thousand pyramids."

There is no wide outlook in Mr. Benson's poems ; none of the aspirations for the welfare of mankind, nor of the revolt against social injustices and limitations to be found in the poems of Shelley and Byron, nor even of those serene visions of man's future, which are among Tennyson's marked charac- teristics. His eyes do not rest on the drama of human life, its joys and sorrows, loves and hates, tragedies and comedies, but are bent upon the world of Nature around him, and in a less degree on thoughts and feelings of a personal character. Indeed, he has himself told us as much in some lines of the pre- face attached to this volume. "Behind the burning questions of the day," he says, "which after all affect legislators and politicians and writers of articles and preachers, more than the classes whom they claim to represent, which interests those who talk more than those who listen, there lies a large region of simple facts, and quiet experiences.

The almond-tree blooms, the rook strides over the new- turned furrow, and the streams hurry through the meadows with a singular indifference to the promises of Socialism and the mysteries of Home-rule ; there is a land where we can always rest, so far as rest is possible in an overpopulated community ; and whatever may be the fate of political theories and Malthusian prophecies, life is very real to the ordinary man, and duty very plain." And this attitude of mind is still further marked in the following lines on Gilbert White :—

" Thou wast a poet, though thou knew'st it not,

Then, on a merry morning, when the thrush Fluted and fluted briskly in the bush, And blackbirds whisked along thy garden-plot, Didst watch an hour beside thy hanger's foot The quivering kestrel hung aloft the skies To mark aught stirring, or with pensive eyes In cherry-orchards didst forecast the fruit.

• Poems. By Arthur Christopher Benson. London : Elkin Mathews and John Lane.

And shall I deem it idle thus to scan The myriad life, and reverently wait, A patient learner, auguring, behind The restless hand, the unhesitating mind ?

This was thy daily task, to learn that man Is small, and not forget that man is great."

Mr. Benson's poems show him to be a faithful disciple of the Selborne naturalist, and indeed he is, as a rule, at his best when he is following in his master's footsteps as a "patient learner" of the "myriad life." Nothing there, however small, escapee his practised eye and ear. Of "man," his other "task," he does not always write with such a successful and spontaneous uniformity ; and this is where the fault of some of his poems lies. He is apt to make what is really the more important subject merely a means for the description— vivid and striking as that is in the following poem—of some natural object or aspect of Nature :—

"The imperious soul that bows to no man's will, That takes by right the service of his kind, Floats in free air, unchastened, unconfined, Strikes what he lists, enslaving, spoiling still.

But when he falls upon the common ground, Swift, swift the visions falter : his brave wing Sustains him not; and that swift shadowy thing Runs from the darkness and enwraps him round.

So you may see the hovering kestrel beat Over the crag, slow-circling, pinions stiff, Then fall through wind and sunshine, check his flight, And as he wheels to perch below the cliff, His shadow fleets across the limestone white And closes with him, settling at his feet."

Evidently here it is the movements of the kestrel and its shadow, rather than those of "the imperious soul" that have stirred and quickened Mr. Benson's imagination. Take, again, a few of the verses from the poem called "A Dragonfly," including the last ones, to illustrate what we mean :— " Mailed in terror, thy harness gleaming,

Soldier of summer, a day's desire !

Lantern eyeballs lustrously dreaming, Mirroring woodland, hill, and spire, Wondering gaze at the depths that pent thee Crawling soft on the dim-lit floor ; Was it the fire in thy heart that sent thee Brave through the ripple, to shine and soar ?

Then when the piled clouds big with thunder Smite thee down with a summer's tear, Floating, lost in a languid wonder, On to the deadly swirl of the weir, Dream of the days of thy sunny playing, Take no thought of the depths beneath, Till the eddies that smile in slaying Draw thee down to the deeps of death.

I too come in the summer weather, Dropping down when the winds are low, Float like birds of an alien feather, Weary of winter and Northern snow, Cool depths under us, blue above us, Carelessly drifting side by side, Is there a heart to guide us, love us ?

Are we but made to be tossed aside ?

Wherefore question of what befall thee Winds that blow from the sunless shore ? One hath made thee and One shall call thee ; Dream in the sunlight and ask no more."

Or, again, those from "St. Luke's Summer ":—

" To-day, when Autumn over leafy miles,

Unfurls his crimson banners, brave and bold, The pine frowns blacker through the forest aisles, When all beside is splashed with reckless gold.

Pale with chill lustre in the duskier plain, The brimming river winding I descry, Under the flying footsteps of the rain The hamlet's whirling smoke-wreaths fade and fly.

Over the red roofs blinks the solemn tower, With shuttered eyelids, meditating peace, Or stirs itself to strike a pensive hour, And dreams and wonders till the echoes cease.

At that calm note a host of broodings rash Take noisy wing, and fly the troubled brain, Bred in the damp hours when the slow rains splash And trickle down the sodden streaming lane.

Thy soft balms mollify the fretted soul, Fresh wind of autumn : how divine to see The tides of circumstance beneath me roll, Alone, upon a grassy down with thee.

Yet back upon themselves the old chimes ring ! Healing is well, yet wherefore wounds to heal ? Bear with the listless hour, the suffering; The breezes blow, and we have learned to feel."

Both these poems would have been more artistic had they been frankly left delicate little bits of descriptive word.painting, instead of which they have been weakened, it seems to us, by the rather ineffectual reference at their close to the life above and beyond Nature, and one hardly grasps the con- nection in the writer's mind between the two as it is expressed here. In "Fritillaries," the first and most important poem in this volume, Mr. Benson proves, however, that he is able at times to write of the human side of life with a poet's fine insight and sympathy. In this poem, the poet, offering his unasked-for and unneeded experiences to the world of men, is likened to a shrinking countryman, who, forced by hunger, gathers and brings into Oxford, in the hope of selling them, fritillaries—" snakes' heads "— " rare outlandish things for such as love them." "Himself he loved them ; thought them magical," but they fade in his hands as the long day draws to its close, and both he and

his spotted wares are heedlessly brushed aside by the hurrying throng :—

"So dreams the poet, rises, breaks away From his austere, unenvied reverie,

And strides towards the indifferent world, to learn If he have power to move, to break their mirth, To bid the laughter dwindle into sighs, Or fill hard eyelids with absolving tears.

Strange growths he carries, children of dismay And madness, echoes of the eternal voice Half-heard through April woodland, sound of winds And bubbling streams, and dewy fancies pure Pulled in dim thickets, when the upward rays Gush from the intense rim of the hidden sun.

He proffers, but the world will none of these ;- They clutch their toys, they strive for sensual bliss,

And few have leisure for the scent of Spring, Save such as flying to the woodland, gain

Sharp sight through grief that tames the fevered pulse, Or such as walking swiftly, find old Death Sit in a sheltered arbour by the road ; And start from lean conventions, wrinkled fears, To cast their eyes for once upon the stars.

And so the wistful poet is disowned, Draws back into himself, and drowns ma soul In some ethereal vision; to the sea He hears the streams grow larger, feels the day Shine purer, though uncleanly voices call, And though the funeral horns blow harsh and high, He sees the smile upon the face of God."

We cannot close this notice without quoting some of the verses from the tender and graceful poem called "A Child" :—

"Old signs are written in thy tender face, Desires, regrets that thou heat never imown, Thou art the heir of thy aspiring race, Heir of a troubled throne,

Of hope, that hardly dost portend the morn, And sadness, that had scarcely guessed at pain, God takes the characters of fate outworn, And writes them fair again.

Those little feet that scarce the light turf press, Those little hands so brown with wind and sun, God grant they tremble not for weariness Before thy course be done.

And thou shalt love, and learn what love is worth, And thou shalt trust, and learn to value men, And all the sudden mysteries of earth, Shall open to thy ken. . ..... . . .

What, wilt be flying ? Am I then too staid?

Can I not smooth the meditative brow ?

Flash through the sun and flutter through the shade,

As birds from bough to bough ?

What ? dost thou linger ? Ah, my dear, how much Thou givest, couldst thou only understand ! The kiss of childish pity, and the touch Of thine absolving hand."

Mr. Benson has a genuine feeling for poetical form and expression. His are the poems of a refined and contemplative mind, slightly tinged perhaps with melancholy. As he leads us into that "region of simple facts and quiet experiences," of which alone he professes to sing, we gladly follow him,

letting the doors close, for the time being, on the strenuous restlessness of the outer world.