Under the Rose. By H. G. Keene. (Bell and Daldy.)—Mr.Keene
is an accomplished writer of poetical verse, which, could it always keep up to the level of its highest excellence, might be called poetry. Most of these poems, he tells us, were written in India ; the reader will be pleased at the tinge of local colour which this circumstance gives them, and which distinguishes them from the multitude of equally elegant verses which he meets with in these days of general culture. In "Perhaps," a poem which we remember to have seen and admired some time ago in a magazine, Mr. Keene expresses with much force and pathos the regrets and speculations of a dying man, and reaches, we think, his highest point. From the "Indian Idyll" we quote a few lines which will illustrate his power of graceful expression rather than his thought, which is always pure and just, and sometimes even noble :—
44 The sun of this wild land is bright, but deadly is its glare.
And poison loads the gales and rains of all the livelong year.
My labours, too, are tameless here—all joyless every feast— My soul is sick for freedom from this weary, weary East.
Oh, for the breeze so pure, though chill, the sun, though weak, so kind. A crust of bread from day to day, with health and peace of mind, And the voices of our children never absent from our hearth, And gladness in the garden plots, where bees and birds make mirth, And in the end, the old churchyard, with two green mounds of earth:"
After these two pieces, the sonnets please us most.
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