Renascence : a Book of Verse. By Walter Crane. (Elkin
Mathews.)—Mr. Crane has many gifts, and has tried his skill in more than one field. The little volume does both author and publisher credit for the tasteful style in which it is produced. Mr. Crane's head and tail pieces help to adorn his verses, but we regret to say that the book, apart from its pretty form, has little to commend it. The decorative pages with which Mr. Crane has made us familiar in book-form give a subordinate place to his efforts as a poet. He now asks our attention more distinctly than he has yet done to his art as a singer, and we think it must be
"Hark! in the wood thy voice, a lion, roars I Beneath thy breath upon the parched hill Shudders the wasted grass and shrieketh shrill, As though it feared thee ; but thy spirit soars To lash the fossil waves of hill and dale Ye may not move, yet melted make appear Their solid sides, enrobed in rains ye bear Across the valley like a falling veil."
There is nothing more inspiriting than the cry for Freedom when freedom is in danger ; but when Mr. Crane calls upon all op- pressed peoples to make bold in common cause, and to come forth "from living tombs of toil where rich man's gold is made," and
"Be gathered to the equal feast 'The earth for all bath spread,"
it is to be feared his invocation, with its assurance that already a new age is begun, will fall upon regardless ears. Assuredly doggerel verses like the following have little of the trumpet-call fitted to announce what the poet calls "The New Light :"—
" Awake, 0 world ! From thy long sleep arise
For a new light breaks in reddening skies, Shake off your rust-eaten fetters, ye slaves And claim the freedom of winds and of waves : 'Unwind ! 0 unwind all the swathing clothes Of bondage and ignorance, nations woes : Break the dark might of enchantment's spell, Burst all thy bonds, and the chorus swell!
' • • """" • • All wrongs shall be dust and ashes on earth—
Dead leaves from whose death shell spring a new birth Which shall spread and grow like a fruitful tree, And under its branches shall live the Free."
Mr. Crane regrets that there has been a delay in the appearance of the book ; we confess that we do not share it. The author has ample ability, but it will never make him a poet. pronounced fantastic and unreal. A measure of competence there is in his rhymes, and of fancy in his conceptions, but sanity of thought and the true imaginative impulse of the poet are lacking. Where there is what one may regard as a genuine utterance of human feeling, it is expended on "the prisoners of liberty," Mr. John Burns and Mr Cunniughame Graham, of Trafalgar Square notoriety. Shelley as all the world knows, has written an ode in which he addresses the "Wild West Wind," which he terms tameless and swift and proud ; Mr. Crane also addresses the same "wild wind," and calls its spirit "tameless ;" but there the resemblance ends. Here are two stanzas from the more recent poem :—
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