Kihnahoe, a Highland Pastoral, with other Poems. By John Campbell
Shairp. (Macmillan and Co.)—The world has, we think, never done jus- tice to theUniversity prize-poem system. If the author of "Kilmahoe" is, as the exact similarity of name induces us to suppose, the gentleman who gained the Newdigate prize some eighteen years back, he is a proof of the benefit resulting to persons of poetical taste from that study of the great poets which is necessary to the lad who writes a success- ful prize poem at college. A man of half his power who was self- educated would have deluged the world with mediocre poetry before he was thirty. Graceful feeling and some power of versification are not enough to make a poet ; he must have originality of thought. To write odes to the skylark or to evening provokes a com- parison from which a man who has studied poetical literature prudently shrinks, and Mr. Shairp has waited till he had struck out a subject just suited to him. "Kihnahoe," we learn from the dedication, is intended to illustrate the manner of life of the lower Highlanders during the youth of the author's father. Thus it deals with scenes and habits of thought with which the author is not only familiar but to which he is tenderly attached, and the result is a volume of real value. It puts into a poetical form what has never been put, or at least as completely put, into that form before. Mr. Shairp, we are sure, would not thank us for calling him a great poet, but the purity
religious tenderness of feeling which mark his verses are really
exquisite. Speaking critically, this perhaps produces an apparent want of force, to counteract which a certain occasional roughness of versification seems to be, as it were, affected by the author.
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