LORD DE TABLEY'S "POEMS."

THE minor poet has been receiving rather hard measure of late. It would appear, according to recent criticism, that the one unpardonable offence against literature and literary men is to publish one of those daintily bound and printed little volumes with which we are all familiar, and to circulate the same among influential friends and journals. But is not this too severe upon the unfortunate author ? His poems may be scarcely original, but there is generally to be found among them some piece of graceful melody or vivid imagination, even though the flowers with which it is bedecked are too quaint and fanciful to be supposed of natural growth.

Lord de Tabley is not a poet of the first rank; but among the minor poets he is certainly entitled to a high place. His work is marked by an individuality and refinement that raise him above the crowd of obscure singers. His poems are the product of a cultivated mind, and many in this collection will demand repeated perusal from all lovers of musical verse. The chief characteristic of the volume, as a whole, is the classical spirit it breathes. The form and expression are, indeed, absolutely modern, and possess the sweetness, occasionally even cloying, of the school of Sednburne. But, verse and rhyme apart, several of the poems read like translations from Greek or Latin, Though the subjects of these belong to the classical mythology, it will not suffice to suppose their tone a skilful imitation,—an assumption, for the moment, of the ancient temper ; for the same note reappears again and again in poems avowedly modern, and influences all the contents of the book.

* Poems, Dramatio and Lyrical. By John Leicester Warren (Lard do Tabley). London Elkin Mathews and John Lane. The beautiful lines to Astarte express a thought which belongs wholly to the pagan world :— " Regent of Love and Pain,

Before whose ageless eyes The nations pass as rain, And thou abidest, wise, As dewdrops in a cup To drink thy children up.

Parent of Change and Death, We know thee and are sad,—

The scent of thy pale wreath, Thy lip-touch and the glad Sweep of thy glistening hair : We know thee, bitter-fair ?"

And, again, in the " Ode to Pan " :- "These eights doth Pan consider, day by day, Labour that runs and Bliss that lags behind, And the slow-ripened fruit of vain desire, Bitter in taste but rosy on the rind: Toil, human woos, disease, confusions blind, Whereby the new gods bend men to obey, And give them hands of lead and brains of fire; And crush them with the heel of iron sway, And weaken them with labour, lest they rise, In Titan fashion proud against the skies."

The thought of the fluctuation of all human things, the helplessness of man before the great forces of life and of Nature, the ceaseless pain of change and death, appears con- tinually with the same subdued melancholy which it brought to the ancients. " Zeus" shows the calm indifference of the gods alike to the joy and pain of humanity ; "An Ode," the same thought with its development,—" The dead alone are strong." The love-songs breathe the same note, some reso- lutely facing the situation, some overpowered with despair :- " Love me : spring goes; every hour Beats out petals of life's flower. What, dear heart, if love be shed Under foot as soon?

Shall the rolling month lay mute Honey word and tender suit P Shall the discord of the dead Alter all love's tune P Ah, we know not ; but indeed It may sweeten true Love's need,

Hearing near a phantom tread, Black in golden noon."

Such is the more cheerful note. The first poem is the hymn to Astarte, raised to the immortal source of life by her perishing creatures ; and the last verse of the volume is a lament for lost love :- "Spring ends, and Love is ended : His lute has lost its tone,

And the cadence, once so splendid, Dies in a wailing moan."

Yet the poems as a whole do not leave an impression of unre- lieved gloom. The " wailing moan " is always present; but it is generally but an undertone. They contain such delight in Nature and the loveliness of life that the shadow is overlooked, and the joy of the present actual existence overcomes all sorrow. They are classic in the joy they express, as much as in the sadness. This thought is put into words in the " Lament for Adonis" :— " The day may draw the sacred twilight down : Tho dew lights on the grasses and the leaves May speck the woods, as night the sky, with stars ; The sun-down gale shall not, because we weep, Forego her perfume, or night's bird her song. Nature is greater than the grief of gods, And Pan prevails, while dynasties in heaven Rule out their little eons and resign

The thunder and the throne to younger hands. He is the rock and these the sounding waves."

A poem of a different class is "Jael." The picture drawn here is not without power ; but we do not think the conception is a happy one. It is of a nineteenth-century Jael, and she no longer appears in keeping with the facts of her story ; still less is the vigour and intensity of the situation, as it stands in the Book of Judges, preserved. Lord de Tabley represents his heroine as stricken with sorrow, with pity for her victim, and disgust at her own folly in seeking to acquire glory by an act of cowardly treachery. Her deed was according to him a hasty act, intended for one of heroism, and only too late does she become aware of its true nature. Then she is overwhelmed, not with remorse, but with disgust and indignation at herself, and pity for the perished strength and beauty of her victim,—in her own words, with "self- contempt more bitter than the grave." This representation suits ill with the stern old story which is its subject. The weakness which can so fall whilst aiming so high, and the languid despair with which the failure is afterwards contemplated, seem to us typically modern, and jarringly inappropriate to the age and nationality of the character. One cannot imagine Lord de Tabley's Jael—one who describes herself as "a mere weak woman, after all is said," and "a curled crushed thing, a blurred white heap of robes "—finding the nerve not only to plan the deed of slaughter, but actually to perform it in the horrible manner of the narrative. Such a Jael would have lost her self-control at the critical moment, and would have broken down on the brink of the deed.

Lord de Tabley's versification is very happy, grace of form and rich melody being its most striking characteristics. An intense love of Nature and touches of exquisite description are evident throughout his work, and are perhaps his prin- cipal merit. He does not, however, always avoid the pitfall of minor poets, the temptation to adorn his verse with strange and fanciful turns of expression. "Amber" is not a word that describes the colour of daffodils. There is a kind, the pale, opaque " honey amber," as it is called, which may be of the tint intended; but when used to denote a colour, the word suggests quite another shade. The adjective " da3dal," too, strikes us as savouring a little of affectation when used so often as by Lord de Tabley. It is hardly English. And of what colour is a " green flame of fulvous hue " P The worst offence of this kind occurs in the poem called " The Bird of my Love,"—" Love, this exile bird we keep," of whom in the second verse we hear :- " He bangs his head, his eyelids close,

The gloss is faded on his wing ; So broken-down he seems with woes, He may not pipe us anything.

I call ; his pale lips quiver loth ; Is thou his song all over for us both P "

The lips of a bird ! And pale lips ! This is unpardonable. As an example of Lord de Tabley's observation and beautiful expression of natural scenes, we will quote the following poem, called " A Frosty Day" :- " Grass afield wears silver thatch.

Palings all are edged with rime. Frost-flowers pattern round the latch. Cload nor breeze dissolve the clime ; When the waves are solid floor, And the clods are iron-bound, And the boughs are crystall'd hoar, And the red leaf nailed a-ground.

When the fleldfare's flight is slow,

And a rosy vapour rim,

Now the sun is small and low, Belts along the region dim.

When the ice-crack flies and flaws, Shore to shore, with thunder shock, Deeper than the evening dawn, Clearer than the village clock.

When the rusty blackbird strips, Bunch by bunch, the coral thorn, And the pale day-crescent dips, New to heaven, a slender horn."