BOOKS.

A NEW ZEALAND POET.* THERE is power, buoyancy, intellectual subtlety, and vivid picture enough in this book to make out a great many poems which would strike the attention of every critic with the least critical insight ; but whether the whole makes a poem we are by no means sure. We mean by a poem,' something which has a real unity of its own, an. imaginative growth which gradually unfolds itself to the mind of the reader, and upon which you look back, when the whole is complete, with greater pleasure and satisfaction than you do upon any one picture or beauty in the separate parts—a sense in which it must be admitted that Cowper's 'Task' is hardly a poem. If there be such a whole in this Day-Dream,' it is unquestionably the unfolding of the hero's thought, from the opening to the

• Rand/ and dmolda: a Dem4h-Dea Day Dream. By Alfred Domett. London: Smith and Elder. 1872.

close of this long and very able and interesting blending of reverie and story. The story itself moves too slowly, has far too many- retrogradations and lapses of meditation, to constitute the poetic whole itself. What there is of it is brightly told, but told for the most part more as if it were a mere 'day-dream,' a fancy-narrative suggested by the author's in- timacy with the grand and as yet virtually undescribed scenery of the northern island of New Zealand, and invented as an excuse for the poetic reproduction of that scenery, than as if his first—or even second,—purpose had been to paint the passions and fortunes of his hero and heroine. There are touches of some power in the painting of Amohia's love, but unquestion- ably the 'day dream' is on the whole the day-dream of the apprehensive and meditative soul, not a dream of the passions and affections. The thread of the story is very simple, in movement very leisurely, very much interrupted, and certainly not the basis of the poem ; the true subject of the poem is meditative, philosophical, spiritual, an attempt to grapple with the deepest doubts in the light of the newest science. And that this effort is made by a mind of brilliance and force both in imagination and reflection, there cannot be, we think, any question. The doubt we feel is whether there is any real growth in the subject thus considered from beginning to end, whether there is any unity in it more than the unity of continuous reverie all cast in the same mood. There seems to us no growth in Ranolfs mind, no real opening out of the speculative doubts and the faiths by which they are answered, from the commencement to the close. The unity is unity of resemblance only, the unity which relates the bright flashes and fringes in one facet of a prism to those in another. The author,—who, if we mistake not, by the way, has been Prime Minister of New Zealand, and one of the six or eight statesmen of European calibre whom the vast political difficulties of that colony produced,—began his day-dream in precisely the same spiritual mood as that in which he finished it,' and did not care to go out of his way to find any law of organic growth for the spiritual philosophy and convictions which he had already attained. Thus the effect left on the reader's mind is of a volume of very imaginatively expressed and finely versified spiritual philosophy, threaded together by a very slight New Zealand story ; we have grand pictures of New Zealand scenery painted for us on alternate panels with vigorous and vivid sketches of modern doubts and faiths ; but when the whole is finished, we are conscious that it rather drops asunder into fine passages than lives as a whole in our memory. Now this is not generally true of the great modern poet whom Mr. Domett seems chiefly to admire..

In a fine eulogy on Browning,—(by the way, Mr. Domett seems to be the single Englishman who has distinguished himself by having puzzled out 'Sordello,' and he is not the man to say he understands it if he does not, for he himself is always lucid),—Mr.

Domett speaks of Browning as of one "whose lays, like eagles, still upwheeling To that shy Empyrean of high feeling, Float steadiest in the luminous fold on fold Of wonder-cloud around its sun-depths rolled.

Whether he paint, all patience and pure snow, Pompilia's fluttering innocence unsoiled ;- In verse, though fresh as dew, one lava-flow

In fervour—with rich Titian-dyes aglow—

Paint Paracelsus to grand frenzy stung, Quixotic dreams and fiery quackeries foiled ;- Or—of Sordello's delicate Spirit unstrung For action, in its vast Ideal's glare Blasting the Real to its own dumb despair —

On that Venetian water-lapped stair-flight',

In words condensed to diamond, indite A lay dark-splendid as star-spangled Night :— Still—though the pulses of the world-wide throng

He wields, with racy life-blood beat so strong—

Subtlest Assertor of the Soul in songr And there he recognises,—with perfect truth as far as all but ' Sordello' goes, and for ' Sordello ' too, we will take it on trust from one so subtle to see and so strong to paint as our author,—the concentration of purpose and upward flight of feeling of Mr. Browning's ideal muse in these poems. This is just what we miss in the 'South Sea Day-Dream,' where the reverie, fine as it is, does not get on, but begins again very much where it left off. The consequence is that the form of the poem seems cumbrous, and we wonder that so much fine material has been cemented together, like the cells of a honey-

comb, into a single whole, under conditions where separation of the separate cells and something more of variety in their law

of structure, would have recommended the contents better than the more elaborate form.

When we have expressed this doubt as to the form of the

poem, we have exhausted nearly all our testhetical objections. The buoyancy of the verse is delightful: and often reminds us slightly of Clough, though not in any sense that suggests borrow- ing. No doubt the parentheses are too long, and the grammatical structures demand too much patience and suspense for ordinary apprehensions,—a page or so sometimes intervening between the nominative and the verb. But with this single exception the language is exceedingly lucid, and the bounding life which runs through the philosophy redeems it from all charge of being abstruse or dry. But before we notice any part of the true subject of the poem, we must show how brilliantly Mr. Domett can paint. We have seldom met with anything more lifelike and buoyant than this picture of reefing topsails in a gale :—

" See ! clambering nimbly up the shrouds,

Go, thick as bees, the sailor-crowds ; The smartest for the post of honour vie That weather yard-arm pointing to the sky : They gather at the topmast-head And dark against the darkling cloud Sidling along the foot-ropes spread: Dim figures o'er the yardarm bowed, How with the furious Sail, a glorious sight, Up in the darkness of the Sky they fight ! While by the fierce encounter troubled The heavy pitching of the Ship is doubled ; The big Sail's swelling, surging volumes, full Of wind, the strong reef-tackle half restrains ; And like some lasso-tangled bull Checked in its mid career of savage might O'er far La Plata's plains, It raves and tugs and plunges to get free And flaps and bellows in its agony But slowly yielding to its scarce-seen foes Faint and more faint its frenzied struggling grows; Till, by-its frantic rage at length Exhausted, like that desert-ranger's strength, Silent and still, it seems to shrink and close ; Then, tight comprest, the reef-points firmly tied, Down to the deck again the sailors glide ; And easier now, with calm concentred force, The Ship bounds forward on her lightened course."

There is something of a true Homeric touch, of the Homeric out-of-doors style of imagination, and of the Homeric 'simplicity of expression in that comparison between a "lasso- tangled bull" on the South American plains, bellowing and striving to get free, and the half-reefed sail plunging wildly against the efforts of the reefers in the wild Atlantic gale. That passage alone would set down Mr. Domett as a poet, whatever may be the defects of his poem. But there are passages of much more delicate, if not of more vivid painting than this. For a certain classical grace and refine- ment of colouring perfectly appropriate to the subject, we can hardly select a better than the following beautiful reverie on the cicada, which naturally enough recalls to the poet the grasshopper of the great autochthones of Greece:—

" Meanwhile unseen cicadas fill The air with obstinate rapture shrill—

A wide-fermenting resiless hiss Proclaiming their persistent bliss ; As if the very sunshine found A joyous voice—and all around, While woods and rocks and valleys rung, In brilliant exultation sung.

And Ranolf loved—could not but prize That tiny classic Cymbalist, So graced with old Greek memories ;

The rapture-brimmed, rich-burnished one—

His bright green corselet streaked with jet,

His brow with ruby brilliants set—

That, undisturbed, would ne'er desist From clicking, clattering in the sun His strident plates—at every trill Jerking with stiffly quivering thrill

His glassy-roofing wings ; as gay

As when two thousand years ago- Where—through thin morning vapour gray, With snowy marble gleams between Blue-shadowy clefts of fragrant gloom, Melodious ever and alive With immemorial bees that hive In honied thickets, lilac-green

With sage and thyme in deathless bloom—

Bare old Hymettus looked serene O'er silvery glimpses far below Of pure Dyssus in swift flow Through plains— one revel of renown ;-

The hyacinth-curled bronzed Attic boy,—

As fond of sunshine, full of joy, In some hot mead where violets hid Blue round the well's white time-worn trunk Of hollow marble slightly sunk

In grass about the spring that slid Slow-steeping crystal all the year— Would pause beneath the olive shade In loitering chat with one so der,

That slim slip of a Greek-limbed Maid, Who looks so sweetly grave upon Sad news about their neighbour's son Killed—since they met, at . . . Marathon ! —Pause, in the act of sucking down The fig she brings him—bursting-ripe, Plump, melting-skinned, and purple-brown, To mark their little gay compeer, As hand in hand they draw too near, Abruptly stilling his sweet shrilling, And edging round his olive branch, Backing and sidling out of sight Of eager eyes, that gleam gray-bright, As one fond wish the Boy expresses, That chirper were but turned to gold To stick in 3Iyrrhin's golden tresses!

While not his wildest dream had told The lad, how many an age to come, In what far regions all unknown, His race's merry earth-born type Would still be singing blithe and stanch, After its own grand Muse was dumb, Its noisy greeds and glories gone 1"

As a spiritual philosopher Mr. Domett must be described as an adherent of the noblest school of Pantheism,—we say Pantheism, because, while he filids the divine everywhere present in the universe, and repels with the most earnest and vigorous strokes the attempts of the Positivists to substitute the mere endless procession of phenomena for the thought and love of Infinite Power, he discloses again and again that he recognises no really distinct free-will in man, that he regards God as working alike in evil and in good, that he considers evil as mere ' defect,' that he dislikes the word ' sin ' as conveying a false notion,—in a word, that he regards the universe as the complete expression of God's mind, and the evil in it as purely secondary and subordinate to the evolution of good. Such a passage as the following, for example, cannot be misunderstood :— "So in the moral World—the Good

Is counteracted and withstood By Evil; yet this last 'tis clear (The matter of the moral sphere) Is found, as the long centuries roll, Still more and more subdued—outdone ; Of those two forces, on the whole The losing and the lessening one.

Although the contest ceases never, Though nothing may the two dissever, Though Evil may the stuff supply

Good works on—here has being by ;

Yet, as Time flies, who can deny, For guerdon of the World's endeavour, Good triumphs—there is progress ever !- No doubt, the single Will Divine Decrees and works both powers; as, when A rower directs a pair of sculls,

With one hand backs, the other pulls—

Both acts are caused by one design.

So Evil seconds Good ; but then The most triumphant element The victor principle, must best That Universal Will suggest,

Best argue the Supreme Intent.

So even in the World we see,

Good grows—and grows unceasingly : This Will must therefore be confessed—

As far as our Experience shows, Or finite faculties disclose Its working—on the whole to tend Triumphantly to some great end In harmony with that high test Itself first planted in Man's breast, With this intent among the rest."

And there are many other passages of like drift. No wonder that when Mr. Domett's hero has to try and explain to the heroine his spiritual faith, he does not make very much of it, and ther author has to confess, which he does with great candour, that,

"Some simple tale of pathos and pure wonder, The founts divine of pity and awe unsealing, With death's great mystery mystically dealing, Her mental clouds had sooner rent asunder— More strongly stirred her fancy and her feeling."

—some such tale, for instance, as the tale of the Incarnation and the Cross, which might, perhaps, have touched something more than" her fancy and her feeling," namely, her conscience and her will ; but Mr. Domett keeps carefully clear of any meeting-point between faith and history, except where he paints the Maori chief's indignant laughter at the missionary's teaching about eternal torments. Mr. Domett's philosophy, however, though strictly speaking, Pantheistic, as recognising no agency really independent of God in the whole life of the Universe, is, as we have said, Pantheism of the highest and most spiritual order. It is the weakness of Pantheism that as it finds everything divine, it may select for special culture and admiration the lower instead

of the higher elements of human life ; it may show a deeper love for sensuous than for spiritual beauty, and claim the former mainly, as of God ; it may take its stand on the passions rather than the purer emotions, and deny any intellectual reason to be ashamed. This is not so with Mr. Domett. His Pantheism is a Pantheism not far from Christian in tone, a Pantheism which, though in one passage it seems to recognise happiness' as the true and only criterion of the elevation of spiritual life (p. 416), —which we believe to be putting the cart before the horse, to say the least, since it is certainly not so in anticipation at all, and hardly so in fruition till the struggle of duty is past and the stage of love of duty reached,—yet generally assumes the same relation between the higher and lower elements of human nature which Christianity itself asserts. But, partly on account of its Pantheism, the spiritual philosophy of the poem is finer, we think, and much truer, on the intellectual than on the ethical side ;- one of the finest in thought, though in language it requires a little study to follow, being the poetical reverie on Mr. Darwin's proof that in the highest organisms there are rudimentary forms completed only in the lowest. Mr. Domett regards this as he would the use by a great artist in his highest works of some initial or personal mark at once connecting him -with his lowest works, as if he were anxious to testify to those who admired his highest conceptions that they were but higher developments of the same designs that he had worked out in simpler and ruder forms. We have not space to extract the pas- sage, but it will be found by our readers on p. 55. We should be doing Mr. Domett injustice, however, if we forgot to say that there are passages full of a grim sort of humour, and also some very delicate and graceful lyrics interspersed through his poem. As a specimen of the former, we may give the following sharp attack on the Ritualists :— "Or who with strangely grovelling Qaixotry

Would think to quell the Evil all about With candlesticks and censers 7—satisfy The crave for Infinite Good that cannot die, With trim and tinselled haberdashery ?

Who, in a fight so fierce in such an age With lackered shields and silvered wooden swords Of ceremonious mummeries would engage ?

With pagan posture-tricks such warfare wage And pantomine, in place on Thespian boards- Stage-twirlings in the death-tug! Who could dote In imbecile expectance to assuage Sharp pangs of soul with prayers run up by rote In self-complacent trills with pompous throat ? Would any heart remorse had desperate driven, Or milder sense of 'Sin' abased, on heaven In accents guided by the gamut call, And do-ie-mi-sol-fa the God of All?"

One of the most powerful and also most playful passages is the bymn of the atomic Atheism, of which we cannot refrain from 'extracting the last few lines :—

" For strange though it seem, this Almighty Mechanic,

Undesigning Designer of all things organic,

Comes from nowhere himself : his own Father and Mother—

Never caused though all-causing—derived from no other ; And arranges, combines for such orderly courses His myriad myriads of multiform forces, By accident only—repulsion—attraction- Into beautiful symmetry, uniform action ; By merest unconscious haphazard produces Profound adaptations to infinite uses ; And as helplessly, stolidly stumbles on wonders, With as little intention, as others on blunders ; Deaf and dumb, and stone-blind, can make eyes, ears and voices, Till with Beauty—Light —Music—all Nature rejoices ; Nay, unconscious beforehand arrives in due season By dint of mere going, at Thought, Sense and Reason ; With no Mind, makes all Mimi—that fine consummation, That can trace the back steps of the blind operation ; Aye can soar on the wings of sublime calculation O'er the flaming far ramparts of star-filled Creation.

So this Fetish—this Stock-God, this Impulse unguided, With no aim and no sense, yet success so decided, Still is fashioning Matter by no one provided Into Minds like vast Mountains a World overviewing ;- With no better notion of what he is doing, Hits off Shakspeares and Newtons and Canaan and Plates-, Than the logs on the ashes which roast your potatoes : And the men who consider the creed satisfactory And would smile with mild pity on Sceptics refractory, Poor crawlers who crowd to a house with a steeple,— Are —some of the wisest and best of our people."

The lyrics are for the most part delicately flavoured with the Maori simplicity and sentiment ; nor can we give a better specimen than the following song of a poor Maori girl, who has just burnt the treasured wreath once given her by our hero, and is trying to free herself, if she can, from the remains of a hopeless passion :—

"Alas, and well-a-day I they are talking of me still : By the tingling of my nostril, I fear they are talking ill; Poor hapless I—poor little I—so many mouths to fill And all for this strange feeling, 0 this sad sweet pain !

"0 senseless heart-0 simple ! to yearn so and to pine For one so far above me, confest o'er all to shine— For one a hundred dote upon, who never can be mine 0 'Us a foolish feeling—all this fond sweet pain !

"When I was quite a child—not so many moons ago—

A happy little maiden-0 then it was not so; Like a sunny-dancing wavelet then I sparkled to and fro ; And I never had this feeling, 0 this sad sweet pain !

"I think it must be owing to the idle life I lead In the dreamy house for ever that this new bosom-weed Has sprouted up and spread its shoots till it troubles me indeed With a restless weary feeling—such a sad sweet pain!

"So in this pleasant islet, 0 no longer will I stay—

And the shadowy summer-dwelling, I will leave this very day; On Arapd, I'll launch my skiff and soon be borne away From all that feeds this feeling, 0 this fond sweet pain!

"I'll go and see dear Rima—she'll welcome me I know, And a flaxen cloak, her gayest—o'er my weary shoulders throw,

With purfle red and points so free-0 quite a lovely show—

To charm away this feeling-0 this sad sweet pain "Two feathers I will borrow, and so gracefully I'll wear, Two feathers soft and snowy for my long black lustrous hair ; Of the Albatross's down they'll be-0 how charming they'll look

there—

All to chase away this feeling-0 this fond sweet pain !

"Then the lads will flock around me with flattering talk all day—

And with anxious little pinches sly hints of love convey ; And I shall blush with happy pride to hearthem . . . I daresay. . . . And quite forget this feeling, 0 this sad sweet pain !"

We have now touched upon the chief characteristics of this remarkable book. As an epic, we cannot say that we think its structure closely knit enough to justify a form which obliges its readers to read it altogether if they read it at all. It is hardly a complete poem, but it is full of poetry. The animation never dies away. The keen intellect rendered vivid by imagination sparkles throughout, though not unfrequently one feels its vagaries out of

place,—as, for instance, in the long description of the astronomical glories Amohia could not discern, for want of knowledge, as she

turned on her back in her midnight swim over the lake,. and saw the great constellations flaming above her. Here and there, but rarely, there are gleams of tenderness and passion. But the claim of the poem to be read is the masterly grasp of the conditions of the modern problem as between Theism and Positivism, though we hold that the author has abandoned a great and permanent stronghold, in giving up, as he undoubtedly does, the freedom of the human will, and the absolute and infinite spiritual chasm between evil and good. Whatever the true critical estimate of this 'South Sea Day-Dream,' there can be no doubt but that its author is a man of great originality and buoyant imaginative

life. No one who really understands the book can help thoroughly enjoying it, whatever he may think of it as a work of art.