POETEY.—Thl Manz Witch, and other Poems. By T. C. Brown.

(Macmillan and Co.)—The author of "Fo'c's'le Yarns" is one of the few writers of dialect verse who have been able to achieve a distinct literary success. "The Manx Witch" will fully keep up the reputation that he has already won. The story is told by a sailor, in the raciest style. Two Laxdale miners, Jack and Harry, court a Manx beauty, "a rose that had grown at the mouth of the mine," and agree to hunt, so to speak, in couples, till Harry has to drop back into the place of " dooiney-molla," which is, being inter- preted, "man-praiser, the friend who backs, and speaks praisingly of the suitor," a place not altogether to his liking. Here is a picture of how he fills it :— " Sometimes Harry had orders

To stand a bit off aback o' some borders, Or under the biggest apple tree.

So there this dooiney-molla'd be, Very patient, but strainim stratumn To hear the coortin, and lek enough rainin, Or snovrin, or blowin- Dear me! what's the odds? No knowin The happy Harry was, just to be catchin The smallest whisper ; like a hen when she's hatchin, Sittin that quite ; but the little sweep Is lienin too for some sign of a cheep At one of the eggs—aw deed she is. And so this Harry ; and if he heard a kiss, Which of coorse he did, and raisonable,

He'd moan the softest he was able—

Like a flute he'd moan, like a flute! surprisin I Semperthizin, semperthizin."

This comedy the " witch " does her best to turn into tragedy. Mr. Brown can use either key with much skill. "Peggy's Wedding" is quite admirable. Peggy goes off in the morning with a skin- flint suitor, and returns to her place the same day with the con- clusion,—" Misthrias ! no more weddins, aw good sakes ! no more weddin's for me !" Two of the poems are in "English." We do not understand the character of Dynely, in "Mary Quayle." "Bella Gorry," on the other hand, is drawn with much skill.— Grass of Parnassus, by Andrew Lang (Longmans), contains between sixty and seventy pieces, most of which have been published before in one way or another. It is needless to say that we are glad to see the old again, and that we give an equal welcome to the new. Mr. Lang's place among the poets of the day is pretty well fixed, though, if he had the will or the opportunity to devote himself to the Muse, he might rise to something much higher. Meanwhile, it is not difficult to be content with him as he is. Here is a piece which strongly reminds us, it will not offend him to be told, of Matthew Arnold :— "AXOTILEH WAY.

Come to me in my dreams, and then, One saith, I shall be well again, For then the night Will more than pay The hopeless longing of the day.

Nay, come not thou in dreams, my sweet, With shadowy robes, and silent feet, And with the voice, and with the eyes That greet me in a soft surprise.

Last night, last night, in dreams we met,

And how, to-day, shall I forget, Or how, remembering, restrain Mine incommunicable pain?

Nay, where thy land and people are, Dwell then remote, apart, afar, Nor mingle with the shapes that sweep The melancholy ways of Sleep.

But if, perchance, the shadows break, If dreams depart, and men awake, If face to face at length we see, Be thine the voice to welcome me."

—With Double Pipe. By Owen Seaman. (Blackwell, Oxford ; Johnson, Cambridge.) Mr. Seaman is at his best when he has his humorous " stop " in use ; but he is always clever and at home with the literary instrument which he wields. "A Plea for Trigamy " is an ingenious adaptation of an idea which was broached in Sir Arthur Helps's " Realinah." "An Elegy in Bucolics " is so good, that we must quote a part of it, with the capital " surprise " at the end :— " • Sweet, I shall get me fame of thee anon,

For then art passing fair and thou art mine, None other's,' she for modesty was dumb,

And hearing would not seem to hear my praise.

But on a day it chanced that there was named A concourse to the which all men should bring Her whom each eye saw fairest, and I smiled To think how she, my choice, should bear the palm Of beauty, and shine fairest of the fair,

And fond I lavished on her gifts untold.

Thinking by added charms of art to grace The comeliness which nature made her own ; And all men deemed her fairest of the fair.

But better loved she in her lowly home All unadorned to fill her lowly place, And wait my wonted footstep morn and eve, Than, widening as to suit a wider sphere.

To shape herself to grander things, and sit

A spectacle for every critic's eve. And pining for the peace which once was hers,

Slow sickening she passed before her time.

And so I hold it be ter, come what may, To win no prize at all at oattle.shows, Than lose, through simply overfeeding her, Your favourite sow, a prey to apoplexy."

"Memories of the Late Classical Tripes" is good, with some in- genious tours-de-force in the rhymes. Of the serious verse, "Death by Misadventuro " is a, powerfully told tragedy. Most of the others are pictures from Nature. We hope to hear of Mr. Seaman again. —Idylls of the HOW. By Harry Douglas. (Spencer Blacltett.) —Mr. Douglas is one of the poets who can write, as Horace puts it, "two hundred verses in an hour, standing on one foot ; " and very respectable verses they often are. His fluency and energy are really surprising; he has a great command of poetical imagery ; and if he could only bring more tact and taste to bear on his work, he might do-very well. A more complete example of thoroughly unpruned luxuriance we have never seen. Here is a specimen of his verse :—

"The true-born son of such true-hearted love, Or gentle he, or simple his estate, His blood shall crimson with the chivalry Of his divine begetting ; and, despite The modest beating of his pulses, he All honest hazards fearlessly shall dare, And in the thickest of life's battle-clash, With noble prowess shall he play the MEM,

And bring the spoils of many a hard-fought fight, And proudly lay them at his darling's feet,

Not blind is he, but strong with stubborn trust : Not cold, but calm, with ecstasy suppressed ; Not dumb, but silent with sheer reverence.

No craven he, though he may somewhat screen With blushing courtesy his manfalness ; Nor niggard, either, though he sitteth dovrn, As honest merchants do, to count the cost ; He scorns to bate its uttermost a jot. But with a golden plenitude he gives

Himself and all he bath, naught questioning,

Ne'er faltering, nor asking aught again."

The poem is a picture of domestic life, with much in it that is admirable; but we are bound to say that a certain reticence as to what is said, as well as a chastening of the style, would have improved it.—The Soul's Quest. By F. G. Scott. (Kegan Paul, Trench, and Co.)—This is a volume of thoughtful verse, not always as correct as care might have made it, and wanting, now and then, in rhythm and sweetness, but with plenty of meaning, and characterised by much dignity of expression. The poem from which the volume takes its name is not, in our judgment, the best. It is a religious allegory, which is yet not an allegory, because in some parts it uses direct language. " Justice " is fine, though the writer has much to learn in the management of blank verse ; his system of pauses is defective. "Evolution" should, perhaps, be ranked highest of all the poems in the volume. Here is part of the conclusion, showing now and then (as in the first line of the third stanza) a distinct weakness of expression, but still eloquent and forcible :—

" Great God ! we move into the vast ; All questions vain—the shadows come ! We hear no answer from the past; The years before um all are dumb.

We trust Thy purpose and Thy will, We see afar the shining goal ; Forgive us if there linger still Some human fear within our soul !

Forgive us, if when crumbling in The world that we have loved and known, With forms so fair to us. we sin By eyes averted from Thy throne !

Forgive us, if with thoughts too wild, And eyes too dim to pierce the gloom, We shudder like a frightened child That enters at a darkened room !

Forgive us, if when dies away All human sound upon our ears, We hear not, in the swift decay, Thy loving voice to calm our fears!

But lo the dawn of fuller days ; Horizon-glories fringe the sky ! Our feet would climb the shining ways To meet man's widest destiny.'

—Audiatoroete ; or, the Eve of Lady Day on Lake George, and other Poems. By the Rev. Clarence A. Walworth. (G. P. Putnam's Sons.)—A volume of somewhat formless verse, but interesting from the love of Nature, Nature as she is to be seen in the New World, which is manifest in many of the poems, and from the earnestness of feeling which they show. Mr. Walworth has something to say, but he has not the art of giving to it a poetical expression.— The Masque of Death, and other Poems. By C. L. Hildreth. (Bel- ford, Clarke, and Co., Chicago.)—This is a volume of always correct, and sometimes forcible verse. "The Prophecy," a fine picture of the first stirring of spring amidst the rigours of an American winter, and another poem on the same subject, under the title of "The Awakening," may be singled out for praise. Here is a stanza from the latter :— "The spongy soil sinks weltering to the foot,

And still thin, dusky streaks of crusted snow In cold shades linger on the hemlock's root;

But all the open lawns and meadows glow

With faint warm flame of many a tender shoot ; The hazel stems are bright with burnished green, And russet-hooded buds spring up between.'

Mr. Trildreth should keep to these themes, which have a freshness that is wanting in much of his verse.-----Heart to Heart. By Ivan Hues. (Kegan Paul, Trench, and Co.)—The chief poem here is a long narrative in octosyllabie verse, the "fatal facility" of which has tempted the author with too much success. Here are a few lines ;—

" 0 cease your ridicule unseemly 01 a bright nation so supremely

Ancient and of lasting fame Ms only ignorance indiums Good men to sink to such abuses, Whom wise men pity more than blame."

All s not on so low a level as this; but the average of Heart to Heart, wherever we have dipped into it, is not much higher.— Highland Flora, and other Poems. By Mrs. David Henderson. (D. Douglas, Edinburgh.)—Some of the verse here has a certain charm and sweetness ; but it hardly gains by being taken beyond the domestic circle where it would be sure to please. If "The Voyage of Baby Dora" was to be printed, its proper place was a children's magazine. The longest poem is scarcely equal to the tragedy of its story. And a critic in the South cannot but wonder how a false marriage can be managed under the very compre- hensive Scotch marriage law.—Semblance, and other Poems. By Charles T. Lusted. (Kogan Paul, Trench, and Co.)—It will probably be sufficient to quote one stanza :—

" The cooling breeze

Swept through the trees, Which waved their branches overhead, And hid her blushes as they spread O'er face and neck with glowing red

In rapid ease."

—Surprise and Song, and other Poems. By J. H. A. Hicks. (D. Stott.)—A volume of respectable verse, where the meaning, how- ever, is not always on a level with the metre. That eyes may outvie "in their azure hue" "forget-me-note of tenderest blue," but surely not "stars in saffron skies," even if stars were visible when the skies are "saffron." In the next stanza, " long " is a strange epithet for "lustre."—We cannot congratulate Mr. J. F. Rowbotham, author of an epic poem, The Death of Roland (Triibner), on the "new metre which has never before been employed in the English language." It is, he says, an " Ode- metre Catalectie, unrhymed, with all its places free but the two last." Even the last but one may be either a trochee or a dactyl, and, in fact, the only fixed thing in the metre is the long syllable which occupies the last place. Even here, as it seems to us, Mr. Rowbotham allows himself some license. Here are a few lines, the third of which certainly does not end with a long syllable :

"Come, buckle up my powers to might redoubled. Bluff battle, I pledge thee anew, And to it I will go again. Yet must I not let Roland see Me in this quarter, or he would reproach me with tantiveying Again at foxes, as God's troth, to confess it, so I have been. Nay, bach reproach, so well deservhd„ can I never face from him."

We have also received :—Louis the Eleventh : a Drama. By John Arthur Coupland. (Elliot Stock.)—Sunshine and Shower, and other Poems. By Eric Lulworth. (Kogan Paul, Trench, and Co.)—A Dream Alphabet. By the Author of "In the Gloam- ing." (Smith, Elder, and Co.)--Sketches front Nature, and other Poems. By John Stafford Spencer. (Pickering and Chatto.)— Poems. By Charles Hardy. (Remington and Co.)—Verse Musings on Nature, Faith, and Freedom. By John Owen. (Kegan, Paul, Trench, and Co.)—Lord Randolph. (Hamilton, Adams, and Co.)—Songs of Adieu. By Lord Henry Somerset. (Chatto and Windus.)—Sonnets and Reveries. By Marcus S. C. Ri :lards. (J. Baker and Son.)—Poems and Song-Words. By Rosie Churchill. (Simpkin and Marshall.)—We have yet to notice, but are not called on to criticise, two more volumes of verse :—Poems. By Adam Lindsay Gordon. (Samuel Mullen.)—Gordon is the poet of Australia ; and wrote not, perhaps, the most accomplished verse which that country has produced, but certainly the most racy of the soil.—Poems of the late George Darby. (A. Holden, Liverpool.) —This volume, printed for private circulation, contains a selection from the verse of an accomplished man, who seemed at one time as though he might have achieved real poetical fame. Carlyle mentions him along with Lord Tennyson and the author of Philip van Artevelde as one of those who, "in this tiny genera- tion," were not "either feeble or fraudulent." It is difficult, with this volume, containing presumably Mr. Derby's best work, to understand this judgment ; but it is at least easy to see proofs of culture, thought, and poetical feeling.