MRS. PFEIFFER'S NEW POEM.*

WALES, land of mists and mountains, of harp and song, is the home of Glan-Alarch, an ancient bard, who in his poem sings

the glories of his chieftain, Eurien,—

" Lord of lands and lives of men, Lord of his wild rock-castle and himself."

Eurien has a mother living with him in his castle-home, who

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Olin-Alarch: His Silence and Song. By Emily Pfeiffer. London: Henry S. King and Co. 1877.

adopts a young girl, a chieftain's daughter, who has been left by the chances of war homeless and friendless. The maiden Mona, lovely and endowed with the gift of song, is a child of the mist, whose personality, as pictured by the old bard, looms indistinctly. That she should love Eurien is natural, and that she should sacrifice herself for his sake does not surprise us, but the way in which she does this will be apt to startle those unimaginative readers who demand realism from the poet as well as from the novelist. A beautiful young widow, the fair Bronwen, mistress of a lordly castle, comes to Eurien to ask for aid against Cynorac, a chief whom it is hinted she had vainly sought to make her friend and master. She is a wily and ambitious woman, with a disposition wholly unlike the dreamy, lofty, but passion- ate nature of the poet-maiden, whose prophet-like strains seem to be uttered unwittingly as she incites the British chieftains against the Sassenach. Eurien excuses instead of praising the song thus uttered, and Mona, heavy at heart from a sense of his displeasure, turns for solace to the free air of the mountains. She rises higher and higher, and as she ascends, the strong heart of nature soothes the girl's sorrow and "sets her life in order :"—

" And then a-weary with her rapid course,

And heavy that her sun was in eclipse, She sank upon the ground, and laid her head As she might lay it on a mother's breast, Soft on a bank, all springy and a-bloom With ling, and sweet with fragrance of the peat ; And there, not listening, looking, hardly living But as a part of Universal Being, She felt the sun that glinted on the sea, The distant waves that dallied with the shore, The vaponry drift, like cobwebs on the blue, The silent shadows wandering o'er the hills, And tenderer, homelier than the sighs tumultuous Of winds which won through rifts of autumn leafage, She heard the wandering breeze that swept her brow Ring tuneful through the bells of mountain heather,

And thought the only mother she had known—

Wild Nature—as she nestled to her heart, Sung her to rest with that soft lullaby."

Not long is she left alone in the mountain silence, for Bronwen follows, to twit her with Eurien's anger, and the shame she had brought upon him, hinting, at the same time, that he had no passionate love for a creature nourished at his hearth, but loves her only as he loves his hound,—

" Or as his falcon, that he blinds with josses,

Then perches—blindly happy—on his wrist."

Mona fails to see through the wiles of Bronwen, but humble though she be, will not readily accept her statement :—

" He loves me, he is pitiful; not so,

But custom is no bar to tender hearts ; He loves me ! I was little when I came, No higher than my heart is now, and weak, And sickly, and I had not learnt to sing.

How had I grown, if I had felt no warmth ?

How had I gotten strength and learnt to sing, If light had never shone on me ? They lie Who say he loves me not ; his love is deep, Patient and calm as deathless things alone May dare to be.'

Said Bronwen, 'Very patient Is Eurien's love, if love he own for you!

Patient and heavenly calm. 'Tie now three years Since you exchanged your troth ; you marvel not That he should sit beside you at the ingle,— A saint who, having nought to do but pray, Forgets to tell his beads. To you it seems

Not strange that he should let the seasons grow From hot to cold, and speak no word of marriage,— Truly a love seraphic ! I were happy— Aye, to the topmost bent of happiness—

If Eurien's calm and patient love, that looks For full fruition in some far-off sphere, Were yours, the while I lay within his arme, And felt against mine own his beating heart!'

Then suddenly aloud on Clegwyn Cromlech, A mingled cry, the shriek of tortured pines, And Mona's wind-swept harp, and it might be, Some passionate escape of Mona's breath, Rising together in a wail of woe

That dashed itself against the stony hills, Which muttered to each other of her pain."

The scene between these two women on the mountain height- Bronwen with her back firmly set against the rock, and Mona resting on the verge of the precipice, with her arm wound about an ash, "deep-rooted in a fissure of the rock"—is perhaps the most animated and dramatic in the poem. The conclusion is likely, as we have hinted, to startle the reader, for Mona suddenly disappears, as if she had fallen sheer down the precipice, and the terrified Bronwen hears a voice from some unknown depth saying,—

"As now you are alone on Clogwyn Cromlech, So now you are alone in Eurien's love."

The action of the poem moves slowly after this, and in some por- tions of it the interest considerably flags. Mrs. Pfeiffer has a great command of rhythm, and her lines flow on with sweetness and grace, but they want in many places the incommunicable art that gives vitality to verse. The thoughts expressed are not feeble, the high faculty of imagination is not altogether lacking even in the tamest passages, and in some parts, as we have proved by our quotations, the writer displays passion and strength ; but on the whole, and in spite of several beautiful scenes which cannot fail to give pleasure to every reader, Man-A/arch will not, we imagine, command that public attention which those who are acquainted with Mrs. Pfeiffer's sonnets might think her capable of securing. The weakness visible in several of her lyrics is not evident here. She has written in a style free in a measure from the feminine fault of over-much effusiveness, and in this respect her work is marked by pro- gress but the execution of a poem in blank verse on so large a scale—Clan-A/arch contains, we suppose, upwards of 5,000 lines—is almost beyond the poet's strength, and we confess to having read some portions of it with weariness instead of with delight.

But the conclusion of the poem, though in parts a little indis- tinct, is, on the whole, noble and satisfactory. Although we guess at Bronwen's wily arts rather than see them, her death excites no pity ; and the return of Mona, no spirit now, as she had more than once seemed to be to Eurien, but a tender and brave-hearted woman, is described with much pathos and poetical feeling. Clan-Alarch is an ambitious and to some extent a successful poem. Its faults are obvious, but the pulse of poetic life beats in it, and leads us to hope for work still finer from its author.