A SOLDIER'S BOOK OF LOVE POEMS.* THE effect of the

war on literature has been most marked. We may say with perfect truth of the. Army what Dr. Johnson said of Pembroke College. " It is a nest of singing birds." Not all the literature that has come from the trenches has been first-rate; but all of it has been sincere, a great deal of it has been sound and good, whether in prose or verse, and the best of it is immortaL But our Army in Flanders does not merely write poetry. It reads it—old and new, Thus it happens that a whole crop of books dealing with literature has been got ready for trench reading. The last product of the effort to supply this demand is the charming poetic anthology entitled A Soldier's Book of Love Poems, arranged by Mr. Godfrey Locker-Lampson, a Member of Parlia- ment and the son of Mr. Frederick Looker, the Praed of tho Middle Victorian epoch, whose exquisitely turned and tuned humorous verse delighted youth and age in the " seventies " and " eighties." Mr. Locker-Lampson tells us that ho hopes that his volume will " help the younger section of the reading public—especially that romantic youth of our country who have gone abroad to fight its battles—to appreciate the finest of our love lyrics, and enable them to discriminate between the first- and the second-rate, the genuine and the artificial, in this kind of verse." Certainly he has attained his object in providing us with first-rate models.

No two men will ever agree about all the poems in an anthology. They are sure to think that certain things ought to have been done in tho way of inclusion and certain other things left undone in the way of exclusion. But apart from this universal `• crab," the present collection is a very charming one. With two inclusions not usual in anthologies we are delighted. In the first place, Mr. Locker-Lampeon has put in Lord Dorset's famous song, " To all you ladies now at land," written at sea in the first Dutch War (1665), the night before an engagement. How many men to-day are writing to wives and sweethearts in its spirit 1— • A Soldier's Book of Lore Poems. Arranged by Godfrey Locker-Lanneson, London Arthur L. Humphreys. (Zs. dd. uct.1

" Then if we write not by each post, Think not we are unkind ; Nor yet conclude our ships are lost By Dutchmen or by wind :

Our tears we'll send a speedier %soy, The tide shall bring them twice a day—

With a fa, la, la, la, la.

The King with wonder and surprise Will swear the seas grow bold, Because the tides will higher rise Than e'er they did of old : But let him know it is our tears Bring floods of grief to Whitehall stairs-- With a fa, la, la, la, la.

• • Let wind and weather do its worst, Be you to us but kind ; Let Dutchmen vapour, Spaniards curse, No sorrow we shall find : 'Tis then no matter how things go,

Or who's our friend, or who's our foe—

With a fa, la, la, la, la."

There is one verse in this poem, however, which will, we are sure, be heartily repudiated by the girls of the present day : - " But now our fears tempestuous grow And cast our hopes away ; Whilst you, regardless of our woe, Sit careless at a play ; Perhaps permit some happier man To kiss your hand, or flirt your fan— With a fa, la, la, la, la."

The other inclusion which we are delighted to see is George Darley's famous "fake." This poem, which Mr. Locker-Lampson calls " True Loveliness," will be remembered by our readers as included in the first edition of The Golden Treasury under the name of " The Loveliness of Love," and not only given as "Anonymous," but placed in the section of the greatest of anthologies devoted to " the latter eighty years of the seventeenth century." Tho story goes that those who helped Mr. Talgrave to select for The Golden Treasury, among whom it is always said Lord Tennyson was the chief, were taken in by George barley's poem and thought that it was true Elizabethan. We are not in the least surprised that the learned and judicious editor was taken in so successfully. barley threw himself back into. the age of Elizabeth and assumed the lyric air of Greene, Marlowe, Heywood. Ralegh, and Lodge. The present writer cannot say whether ho would have found out that Darley was playing the sort of part in literature which in the plastic arts was played by Lucas when he made his wax bust in the mode of Leonardo da Vinci. Now, however, that the secret is out, it is easy to see that there are certain phrases which, though beautiful in themselves, could not have come from Elizabethan lips. The followirg verse has, however, the authentic air of the later

sixteenth century: - " These are but gauds : nay, what are lips ? Coral beneath the ocean-stream, Whose brink when your adventurer slip;, Full oft ho porisheth on them."

Equally true Elizabethan seems the next verse :— " And what are cheeks, but ensigns oft That wave hot youth to fields of blood ? Did Helen's breast, though ne'er so soft, Do Greece or Ilium any good ? "

The last two verses ought to have let out the secret. The last line, indeed, is what an Etonian would call a "float " :— " One in whose gentle bosom I

Could pour my secret heart of woes, I.ike the care-burthened honey-fly That hides his murmurs in the roses--

My earthly comforter ! whose love So indefeasible might be, That when my spirit wonned above, Hers could not stay, for sympathy."

As to poems which are included and might well have keen left out, we have marked some half-dozen, but we refrain from naming them. After all, the soldier is not going to look a gift-book of this kind in the mouth. He will find so much to delight him that even if he agrees with us in turning up his nose at one or two " non-effective " and supernumerary verses, he will still find the fighting line well held: k is glorious to think of men and officers, like the knights of old, charging with the best of these love lyrics ringing in their ears, or seeing the God of Love all armed in the vault of Heaven, rosy in the sunset or the dawn, or resplendent in the light of the enemy's flares and star shells.

In ono of the noblest and most wonderful of the Epithalamiume of the age of Elizabeth the poet tells. us how

" Wildest Cupid waking hovers With adoration 'twixt the lovers."

How often does he hover now above the parapet, though seen only by true lovers' eyes, and give to the grim realities of war a sanctification and a nobility that without him could never be theirs ? Ho. vitalizes death and reincarnates the Golgothas in "No-Man's-Land." He deserves a war Hymn Book, and finds it in A Soldier's Book of Lora

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