BOOKS.

MRS. PFEIFFER'S POEMS.*

THERE is a touch of genius in Mrs. Pfeiffer which comes out most distinctly in her more thoughtful poems, but does not fail to show itself, for the most part, even in those which we read with nervous distrust, for fear of that tendency to gush which love-verses so often betray. We suspect, indeed, that there is no kind of poem which is so difficult to write without falling into

weakness or sickliness as a love - poem ; nothing in which the style of conventionality and affectation approaches so close

to the style of high personal and individual feeling ; nothing in relation to which it is so easy for the author (though for no one

else) to mistake for true wine that medicinal drug whieh is in- tended to answer a very different purpose from true wine,—wine of ipecacuanha. There are one or two little poeins in this volume which seem to our ears, though they may be over-fastidious, to have fallen short of love-poems after this too common fashion. " Everild," for instance, is one of them. There is something unreal about these raptures over " my blushing, close. lipped Everild," and the secrecy of her " sweet hidden ways " of love, which makes us thoroughly uncomfortable as we read. We should say that there was more in this poem of effort than of imaginative feeling, more of manufactured than of natural sweet- ness. The previous poem is much more genuine, though we should

have read it with more pleasure if it had had a more reticent and less gushing title than "Loved Florimel," which is a title to

make one uneasy. Still the poem is, on the whole, beautiful and genuine. It expresses a woman's newly-found delight in herself and her own beauty when she finds that she has gained the love she wanted; and some of that delight is delineated with true freshness and power :—

"Long-loveless heart ! how little have I known

You held such rare surprises stored away; I feel as one who, looking on some lone Troo-shadow'd pool, has seen its waters thrown A laughing fountain in the face of Day. Deep joy that from innumerable rills

Comes filtered from the far Eonean hi ls, Mount, mount and show thy level in the sky,

And prove to mockers that thy source is high !"

That is a fine verse, but we are a little disappointed again in the conclusion, when the lady praises herself as

"a queen-woman in a hive of sweetness,

Lowly and gracious in Love's all-completeness,"

where, as it seems to us, a sort of forcing-pump of poetic satis- faction over herself is set to work, and the flow of natural emotion suddenly ceases in the violent effort to condense into a single epigrammatic couplet the sudden self-reconciliation which is the idea of the poem. We might say the same of others of the love-poems, though in one or two, like "Broken Light," and the song called "The Message," there seems to us that Mrs. Pfeiffer strikes a more genuine and individual chord of feeling. Still, the fault of this class of poems is that there is too much approach to sentimentalism in them, a good deal too much considering the genuine power which some of them display. Mrs. Pfeiffer is too fond of poetic affectations. We cannot pretend to hie such a burden to a song as "since singing liketh me," and there is little in that particular song except the burden to carry the burden off.

Mrs. Pfeiffer is never so poetical as when she is simplest, and hardly ever so simple as when she has got a thought to express as well as a feeling. Her ballads have a certain force as well as beauty in them, and the little poem called "The Crown of Song" is full of glow, though to our judgment there- is a little too much of self- consciousness in the singer, who insists that she was " no calm, cold priestess of Art," but "a victim'slain in its sacred fire," and that therefore all, "to her very name," should die. Bat it is when Mrs. Pfeiffer gets to themes which occupy her whole mind, as well as her fancy, that she seems to us to lose the slight mannerism, or ;estheticism, which interferes with the effect of her verse, and to mount into the world of true imagination. The fine poem on " The Dark Christmas of 1874," written just after the horrible railway accident near Oxford, con- tains, to our thinking, better poetry than any in the book except

• Poems. By Emily Pfeiffer. London: Straban and Cu. the sonnets, though, perhaps, even there she harps a little too, long on the same string. The following, for instance, is all fine and all simple "Sing as ye may or can, ye sorrowful hearts,— As ye can or may,—

Then turn and dance with the children, play out your parts To the end of the day ; • For to children the feast of Child-Jeans is glad as the-morn Wrapt in mist at its birth ; Let them keep it in gladness till children shall cease to be born To the sad old earth!

Hold by the hands of the children, hard worker and sage, Let them lead the round, For a moment the soul of their joy may your torment assuage, Caught at the bound ; And when weary of leaping, and laughter, and shrill delight, To the pine-wood blaze Draw closer, and whisper of giant, of gnome, or of knight, Of ghosts or of Pays; Fill the children with magic and moonshine, with wonderment, Or with high emprize •, Fool them with fancy and fear to the top of their bent, Through their ears, through their eyes ; For the child is simple, and thinks there must lurk behind The world and its shows, A mystery, haply a meaning, the trace of some mind, Or of many ; who knows?

So the creature that knows so little, and feels so much, Is stirr'd by a thrill, When it sees that the things which seem dead to the sight, and the touch, - Are moved as by will.

To the child, unlearn'd as simple, the leap into life Of the infant year, Is a marvel as great as the fables of any' old wife,' Prophet, or seer ; So it welcomes the shiftiest tale if it only profess To account for a part Of the wonder which weighs down the world, and begins new to press On its innocent heart.

Let him think he may catch behind Nature a shadowy Cause, Tell him not all we know !

Lest, closed in a fortress of fact and mechanical laws, He should leave off to grow.

For the spirit is nourish'd by wonder, by faith, and by love,— Things as dreamy as high;

And I think none have ever been forward their life to disprove Till beginning to die."

Then comes a verse which must have been written against the grain, for we are quite sure that Mrs. Pfeiffer herself felt that she was spoiling her poetry by the cold and not, we think, very successful attempt at satire :-

Then leave to the children whose spirits have wings to spread, Sweet joy and surprise,

'Tis the milk of babes, yet unable to feed on the dead, With grown men and with flies."

The sneer launched at "grown men and flies " that they "feed on the dead" is not in any true harmony, either of thought or of feeling, with the drift of the poem, which is a sort of protest against the mechanical philosophy that explains away the deeper beliefs of men. It is not in harmony with its true thought, for the habit of feeding on dead things is not in any way an apt symbol of the habit of explaining away life by referring its marvels to what is not living; nor is it in harmony with its true feeling, for the conception of fly-blown meat, which it suggests, is a conception of rottenness, not a conception of blindness or spiritual dullness of vision. However, the close of this poem seems to us as full of music as it is of fresh spiritual thought :-

"Spread the cerementa over the symbol of Jesus' birth, As over a corse,

Still the soul of the symbol, immortal, will walk the earth, Without hindrance or loss.

Without hindrance—ay, for the spirit is all divine, Math nor 'flesh nor bones ;' It sleepeth not, hath no need of our bread or our wine, Finds a passage through stones.

But for loss—may we dare to affirm that no loss is ineured, No potence foregone,

By the spirit unhoused, the unorganised, bodiless Word, When it wanders forlorn ?

I know not, but know : when the world is baptised into youth,. Pass'd through fire or gore,

A 'body' is alway 'prepared,' and the spirit of truth Made incarnate once more.

And though ever, and ever, as long as the world shall endure,. Will the day and the night Still chase each other, for ever one truth will stand sure : We are made for the light!

And for ever and ever, when death shuts the eyes of the day,— In that hour supreme,— Love, taking new flight, soaring higher, will find out a way Our lost life to redeem.

Lift up the hymn once more in this sad Yule-tide, Lift up the hymn ! The night may be darker than any since Jesus died, And as cold as dim ; But the dawn is breaking, and after the dawn, the day, And they one and both Axe made to our need—the day for our work, and our play, The night for our growth.

Sing with the child and the bard in his measureless youth, He who, caught in the throes Of his passion, becomes as a Delphian month-piece of truth, Speaking more than he knows.

Lift we the carol on high as with now-blown breath From the glithmering earth, That all who were wailing of sorrow, of sin, and of death, May sing with us of birth!"

But on the whole, Mrs. Pfeiffer's best poems are her sonnets, where the restriction of movement and the necessity for brevity have evidently helped instead of hindering her. Some of these, —which will, we believe, be familiar to most of our readers,—are, to our minds, among the finest sonnets in the language ; these two, for instance :— I.

" 0 Nature! thou whom I have thought to love,

Seeing in thine the reflex of God's face, A loathed abstraction would usurp thy place,— While Him they not dethrone, they but disprove. Weird Nature! can it be that joy is fled, And bald unmeaning lurks beneath thy smile ?

That beauty haunts the dust but to beguile, And that with Order, Love and Hope are dead? Pitiless force, all-moving, all unmoved,

Dread mother of unfather'd worlds, assuage Thy wrath on us,—be this wild life reproved, And trampled into nothing in thy rage Vain prayer, although the last of human kind,— Force is not wrath,—but only deaf and blind.

"-

Dread force, in whom of old we loved to see A nursing mother, clothing with her life The seeds of Love divine, with what sore strife We hold or yield our thoughts of Love and thee !

Thou art not calm,' but restless as the ocean,

Filling with aimless toil the endless years— Stumbling on thought, and throwing off the spheres,—

Churning the Universe with mindless motion.

Dull fount of joy, unhallow'd source of tears, Cold motor of our fervid faith and song, Dead, but engendering life, love, pangs, and fears, Thou crownedst thy wild work with foulest wrong When first thou lightedst on a seeming goal, And darkly blunder'd on man's suffering soul."

And again, this sonnet, which, though one of a series, admits very well of being read out of its place in the series, gives out a ring, in its very fine concluding lines, such as vibrates with the condensed power of all successful poetry in the heart

All creatures eagle-born and eagle-taught, Whose nests are set upon the giddy height, Who fear the dread abyss, but love the light,

And sheer through love and pain to trust are brought,—

How is it when ye, too, are overwrought, Seized with love-madness, and in upward flight Quit the sure world to hold the sun in sight?

How fares it with ye when in falling short Of your desires, ye drop again to earth?

What are your lives the better of the sun?

And if, as well may be, you should give birth To others soaring higher, a hat were won ?

No answer,—but wide wings and hearts aglow ; The sun is there, be draws them, and they go!"

To sum up in a few words, there seems to us to be, here and there, too much mathetic consciousness and effort in these poems, here and there a little poor and conventional trilling, and now and then a false note, due to the intellectual will-work with which Mrs. Pfeiffer allows herself to interrupt her poetic mood. Again, here and there, as in the " Ode to the Teuton Women," there is too mach of a didactic effort to preach a gospel,—an effort which almost always spoils a poem. But there is a great weight of truly-blended thought and feeling in many of the poems ; and in not a few of the sonnets, where the thought and feeling are so closely intertwined that it is impossible to separate one from the other, there are flights of true imagination of which, to our mind, almost the greatest of English sonnet-writers might, and possibly would, have been proud.