MR. HALIBURTON'S NEW POEMS.* THE poets of Scotland have an

immense advantage in the facility of rhyme offered by the open vowel, which they share with foreign countries. Lord Mayor Evans has recently declared the French and the Welsh to be the two most poetical

of the tongues of the world,—at all events a new selection. But our rivals lose in losing strength of expression, which moves perhaps beat in tatters, and makes power the characteristic of English poetry, which in the hands of its masters will cer- tainly admit inferiority to none. No doubt the temptation of many of them, notably of Lord Tennyson in later years, has been to take refuge in blank verse from the exigencies and rarities of English rhyme ; but Milton was never more power- ful than in rhyme, where many others have followed. Shake- speare himself is never more poetical than when he points his fancy with rhyming music ; and the very difficulty of the work • Oclul Idyls and other Poem*. By Hugh Haliburton, Author of " Horace in Homespun," "In Scottish Fields," do. London: William Paterson and Co. 1891.

has made of society verse a tempting though a dangerous trade. Most of it is abominable, some superexcellent, though we are not now concerned to name names.

Mr. Haliburton, the author of the little volume before us, himself doubts in his preface if the popularity of his Horace in Homespun was, after its Horatian origin, due to its Doric form ; and, to test his theories, he offers another volume, with Latin headings, as before, to many of the contents, but also with a number of bits of verse in downright English, making, as he says, the venture of an excursion into English fields, and thanking English periodicals like Macmillan and Good Words for offering hospitality to so many of his Scotch children. As for the Scotch periodicals, he says that but for them he should never have published at all; and the public, therefore, distinctly owe a poet to the Scotch editors, as the Hungarians owed their novelist, Jokai, to the insight of his legal em- ployer. For Mr. Haliburton has the true ring of the sweet Caledonian singer, beyond doubt, with a bountiful sprinkling of that rich Caledonian humour which is as true as it is peculiar, as distinctive as ever the Hibernian was,—if, indeed, the Hibernian quality be exactly humour at all. There never was a 'greater instance of the value attached by the English to the utterance of a privileged authority, than the fact that Scotchmen have been set down as jokeless, as a rule, ever since it pleased Dr. Johnson to say so. Yet Burns is fall of humour, and Moore has none. And when one reflects that probably Dr. Johnson founded his wholesale theory on the undoubted fact that Boswell was not quite a wit, we feel on how small a foundation a national charac- teristic may rest.

" The Auld Farmer's Address to the Prodigal Sun," " wha came home in September after sax months' absence," is a capital touch of Nature, forming as it does the first of a little trilogy. It is true that it has to be partaken of with a good deal more than a grain of the glossary at the end; but there it is that Scotch poetry has its counter-disadvantage. Nor does the glossary itself always allow for the full ignorance of the Southron. Our knowledge finds many gaps in the following :—

" Hoo daur ye blink upon the stooks,

That wadna shine upon the grain, But left us to oorsel's for ooks [weeks] Or the waur company o' the rain?

We did oor pairt ; we teel'd the laund, An' cuist oor corn into the yird [earth] ; We micht wi' profit held oor haund, Wi' you and wi' your broken wird.

Noo that the sizzen's owre ye haste, Wi' fogs an' cranreuch i' your train, Thinkin' to share the shearer's feast- Gae to the lands ye ea' your ain !

Swith to the lands that had your lauch, An' sorn on them for horn and spune : It's no' for you the fatted calf, It's a' for you the pair o' shoon !

Nae robe, as ye may well suppcse ; Nor ring—faith, that wad be a sham ! Unless I had it P your nose, To lead ye back the gate ye cam' !

We've managed in a kind o' wey Without the favour of your face : We've rawed oor neeps, an' made oor hey, An' towl'd amang the weet like beass !

Look whar your wark negleckit lay, An' meditate what micht lase been ; But dinna think to mend the day, By blinkin' for an hoor at e'en ! "

It must be admitted that this is Doric enough for anybody ; but when we have mastered the fact that " cranreuch " means hoar-frost, and that " sorn" is to live meanly at another's expense—in other and in good correspondent slang, to " sponge "—while " swith " is left mysterious, " rawing neeps" being-likewise only to be gathered from the context,

we feel that we have a very good piece of fun to deal with, both in idea and manner. Young Scotland has his reply to the old grumbler in the next set of verses :—

" Awa', auld man! ye're oot of date,

Ye've lived some score o' years too late, Your ways are auld an' antiquate, Your watch is slow ; The proper place for you's a seat In Joseph's show.

Last week when ye begond to crack, Ye brocht my auld gran'faither back ;

Dooce man he was, but unto' slack, I think I see 'im !

It was as if some mummy spak' In some museum."

The moral of the young rebuker who teaches us that " pettle" is Scotch for "hand-plough," is that the new school mean to put all seasons and all soils right, to make heat and light and winter and summer for themselves, without any reference whatever to suns and rains :- " When that electric pooer shines oot, As shine it will, there's no a doot, Dispensin' free to flooer an' fruit The best o' weather, You an' the Sun can wheel aboot, An' aff thegither !"

The young farmer is thoroughly up to date—to use the modern catch-word which the world owes to that quaintest of modern popular humorists, Mr. G. R. Sims, a Dickens in his way—or indeed, as the third poem argues, a little before it.

Number three is the elder farmer's "Address to Baith," though the balance which he holds is much on the older man's side. He tells him that "his thrawart soul needna cast laith at offer'd mercies," driving us in despair to the glossary to find out that " laith " means " scorn," and we may make what we can of " thrawart." That is the worst of glossaries. They are always, in logical phrase, redundant and defective. We do not the least want to be told that a "kelpie" is a water-spirit, or that the " haill " is the whole ; but we should like " biggin' " and " thrawart " translated. But the young man's college ways meet with much severer rebuke from this middleman of verse, whose moral is the old one, that we can command no miracles in the long-run, and have " mair to cultivate than corn" in minding the spirit's wants, and studying how to get rid in the end of the " bonds of matter," which, after all, does not read much better as " maitter." That is very right, and as it should be, but some- how leaves an uneasy feeling that number two has the best of it as things stand now, and as the bonds of matter are all that we know anything about, we had, after all, to do our best to harness miracles like electricity when we have once begun to use them, even if we cannot quite command them when in harness. The reader, however, may favour whichever of the controversialists he likes. It is for the author to stand dramatically and impartially behind the three, as perhaps Mr. Swinburne has done the most effectively of those who have lately ventured on this favourite form of trilogy, in his beautiful " Within Church," " Without Church," and " Beyond Church," where the same metre is chosen for three frames of thought diametrically opposite, and where the poet is un- doubtedly at his highest where as a thinker he may perhaps place his sympathies least, in the first of the series.

Merely referring our readers, or those of them who care to make acquaintance with Mr. Haliburton in his own volume, to the bright memories and suggestions of his favourite Othils which give him his title and inspire his thoughts—(what is a " wussle-wud," by-the-bye P and what is a " stelt" which he happened on while he was scouring for it without waiting for his claes P-0 glossary ! we want to enlarge you very much at times !)—we will tarn to some of the poet's essays in the English vernacular. We fear that, like his idol and model, Burns, Mr. Haliburton is not quite so successful without his vernacular wings. But "Nebuchadnezzar the King," has a lyrical ring in it :- " I swore I would conquer the nations ; They truckle to me, they are tame : The farthest that are bring oblations, The fiercest acknowledge my name !

I had strength in my armies to fight with, And skill in my captains. The skill

And the strength of success I am bright with—

Not theirs . it sprang out of my will.

I caught at their strength and I wielded, I quicketed and made it my own : It lay—till uplifted it yielded Its weight to my grasp—like a stone.

And the skill of my captains was scattered, Like beads of bright gold in the sun, Till my glance like fire-fingers up-gathered And fused the lost fragments in one."

There is power in this, and truth, if a little too clearly Swinbarnian in expression. And the acknowledgment that as his will to his captains, so to his is the mightier will which he feels but cannot trace, is finely imagined and finely worked out. Find }Dm is the moral of the poem, and the same spirit pervades the very different "poem in sonnets " which follows, under the title of " Trying a Yacht." " The Mind and the Sun and the Sea "—which our author calls the three free and unfenceable gifts—who made and gave them P The similes are not all very new—sea-similes seldom are—and Leviathan at play are suggestive of many a memory. But simple sea- similes always please. Eschylus was best of all, with the

cip8pdpost yactat.eee : and Swinburne was very happy, with " the

wet salt face of the sea." And Mr. Haliburton is direct and simple, with the instincts right.

"The Study of a Bank" is long for the proportions of the volume, and as a piece of close observation of Nature, the poet would probably wish to be judged by it. For us it is a little too close,—too elaborate not to resemble a newspaper correspondent's report a little too closely for a poet's license. A four-foot larch just without the fence; then a strip of rich brown mosses, and the dusk-red bosses of a clover-bed next. that,—is not this a little auctioneery ? And Mr. Haliburton will forgive us for saying that such rhymes as " totum " and " bottom," " genista's " and n sister's," or " snperficies " and "delicious," are by no means Doric in their suggestions of music or of rhythm, but Cocknic rather, if such a style may be. Even in his Scotch rhymes he is sometimes shaky. We cannot allow that " whuns " and " wun's " rhyme on other than French principle, forbye that our friend the glossary leaves us ignorant of the meaning of either. Save for that transgression, " The Wicke of Baiglie " is a bright and characteristic little poem ; and a " halflin' " is delightful Doric for a hobbledehoy, though his " stirk-like glowre " be mysterious. " The Tinklers " is another capital piece of Burns-like verse; and the description of a real rainy day, whereon the tinkler and his towsie mate " skelp alang thro' dub an' dirt," and- " Sair dings the rain upon the road, It dings—an' nae devallin o't," is graphic enough to make one feel " skelping " and " dub " without being told their meaning, and to wonder what the etymology of " to deval "—translated " to cease "—may chance to be. " Kebbuck " for a cheese, " aumry " for a cupboard, " hap " for a cover, " shilpit " for emaciated, " snooving " for walking on steadily,—are among the locutions really new to our Sonthron ears, which carry curiosity with them.

Mr. Haliburton's latest volume has, we think, justified the verdict passed upon the first, that he is a true Scotch singer. We lose sight a little of the appropriateness of some of the Horatian headings, but like him none the less for that. He is a true lover of the country of his birth and of its rural side, and we trust that he may never whummle after fowling at his tredd for towmonts ; and that in any whip o' dearth of new poetry for reading, we may prove yap and yauld to receive him for a couthie eerie, and not cuissen him easily. Our readers will guess that we are drawing on the glossary, not needed for an appropriate envoi like this :- " Far and low in the frozen South The sun gleams icy clear : It is he—and I kiss his baby mouth, And stoop to the young New Year."

Of course Mr. Haliburton must write some poem of length and purpose before he can be judged upon a higher grade than that of a singer of short melodies. But as far as he has aimed he has thriven.