MR. BUCHANAN'S NEW VOLUME.*

IN a previous volume of poems,—two or three of which are republished here in their natural connection, with a great addi- tional number of the same cycle,—Mr. Buchanan gave us speci- mens of studies after the genius of the Celtic literature, i.e., of the wild, and tender, and ghostly treatment of the emblems of Nature, as if she were, not what Wordsworth and his school found or made her, a minister of human strength and wisdom, a rich field whence the hardy spirit of self-possessing humanity can draw an endless store of joy and guidance, but rather a mighty and mystic phantom, scaring us with strange hieroglyphs of infinite meaning, and startling our ears as with the inarticulate moan of a waste and "melancholy ocean." Had not Mr. Buchanan shown in previous volumes with how strong and true a band he can draw what is definite and positive in human life, this volume of almost banshee-like lamentations and weird prophecy might have seemed to some the mere wails and presages of a morbid imagination. But from the man who has written the Legends of Inverburn and the London Lyrics, wbo has told us the stories of ' Liz' and' Nell,' and of the ill-conditioned tailor and his worse- conditioned starling, we may feel certain that these ghostly fancies are no results of the weakness which shrinks from the realities of human life.

And yet there can be no doubt that this is in every respect a

very ghostly book,—ghostly, we mean, not in the old sense in which ' ghostly' is identical with spiritual,' but in the more ordi- nary modern sense in which ' ghostly' expresses that aspect of spiritual things which curdles the natural blood within the veins, and makes " the hair of the flesh stand up," because a spirit passes before your face of which you cannot discern the form. That feeling of blind sensitiveness to influences in which no trust is felt, that kind of shiver of the soul and body which the old superstition attributes to the tread of some mortal foot above the spot where your body is destined to lie, runs through almost every page of this book. Mr. Buchanan begins with describing,- " How God in the beginning drew Over His face the Veil of blue, * nee Book of Orm: a Prelude to the Epic. By Robert Buchanan. Strahan and Co.

Wherefore no soul of mortal race Hath ever looked upon the Face,"

and telling us that Earth once had the full vision of her Master and Creator ; but that when man came to live on earth she was struck blind and dumb, lest she should tell him too much for his peace. Earth's wise men, using the utmost resources of science, fail to pierce behind the veil, and report to the people that there is no God, and that it is better not to be, as they descend wearily front their dreary heights of frigid speculation. After this proem on the mystery which seems to draw a physical veil over the face of God, there follow various books intended to illustrate the ana- logous mystery of the physical veil which is drawn over the soul of man, and its uses,—the shadow of fear ever haunting the body, and yet the body in some sense softening the violence of purely spiritual changes. Both the unity and the discord between the soul and the body are insisted upon with a weird emphasis :—

" My Soul, thou art wed

To a perishable thing, But death from thy strange mate Shall sever thee full soon, If thou wilt reap wings, Take all the Flesh can give : The tench of the smelling dead, The kiss of the maiden's mouth, The sorrow, the hope, the fear, That floweth along the veins : Take all, nor be afraid ; Cling close to thy mortal mate !"

In contrast to this strongly-flavoured assertion of the lesson which the cwaal has for the spiritual part of man, take the following equalrstrong assertion of the imprisoning and eclipsing character of the bodily tenement which the soul inhabits :—

" Not yet, not yet,

One dweller in a mortal tenement Can know what secret faces hide away Within the neighbouring dwelling. Ah ! beloved, The mystery, the mystery ! We cry For God's face, who have never looked upon The poorest Soul's face in the wonderful Soul-haunted world. A spirit once there dwelt Beside me, close as thou—two wedded souls, We mingled—flesh was mixed with flesh—we know

All joys, all unreserves of mingled life—

Yea, not a sunbeam filled the house of one But touched the other's threshold. Hear !no swear I never knew that Soul! All touch, all sound, All light was insufficient. The Soul, pent

In its strange chambers, cried to mine in vain—

We saw each other not : but oftentimes When I was glad, the windows of my neighbour Were dark and drawn, as for a funeral ; And sometimes, when, most weary of the world, My Soul was looking forth at dead of night, I saw the neighbouring dwelling brightly lit, The happy windows flooded full of light, As if a feast was being held within."

From this delineation of the mystery inherent in the tie between soul and flesh, Mr. Buchanan returns again to the other and still deeper mystery of the relation between man and God, and in a series of short but passionate poems expresses the sense of mystery excited by God's apparent tolerance of evil, rejects the ' severe ' codes of religion which justify the condemnation of sinners to enduring pain, and cries for a revelation of the true divine life behind the veil. Then he answers his own impatient cry in a striking dream of the petrifying effect which a real unveiling of the infinite Life would have upon such finite natures as ours. The veil of blue is supposed to be drawn aside, and the immutable face of the Almighty seen gazing calmly down on earth, with this result :—

"At the city gateway The Sentinels gather'd, Fearful and drunken With eyes like glass— Look up they dared not, Lest, to their terror, Some luminous Angel Of awe should pass; And my Soul passed swiftly With a prayer, And entered the City:— Still and awful

Were street and square. 'Twas a piteous Sabbath Everywhere—

Each soul an eyeball, Each face a stare.

"In pale gruups gather'd The Citizens, The rich and poor men, The lords, the lepers From their loathsome dens. There was no traffic, The heart of the City Stood silently How could they barter, How could they traffic, With the terrible Eyes to see.

Nay! each man brooded On the Face alone, Each Soul was en eyeball, Each Shape was a stone ; And I saw the faces, And some were glad, And some were pensive, And some were mad; But in all places, Hall, street, and lane,- 'Twas a frozen pleasure, A frozen pain."

We hardly apprehend the relation of the section which follows to the plan of the book. It consists of a number of sonnets, appar- ently written near Loch Coruisk in the island of Skye, and representing the varying moods and emotions of man toward the Divine Ruler,—from bitter rebellion to profound humility and repentance,—and scarcely seems to contribute anything to the progress of the thought. It repeats the complaint of God's invisibility, of which a mystical explanation had been already offered, accuses God of being at once beautiful and pitiless, and altogether seems to be a return to an earlier stage in the develop- ment of the thought. Last, come sections in which a more or less coherent attempt is made to explain away all moral evil as defect,' and justify the existence even of sin and temptation as forms of good. We will give a specimen, not by any means the finest, but one of the shortest and most easily separable *m the context

" ROSES.

" Sad, and sweet, and wise, Here a child reposes, Dust is on his eyes, Quietly he lies,—

Satan, strew Roses!'

"Weeping low, creeping slow, Came the Weary-winged; Roses red over the dead Quietly he flinged.

"'I am old,' he thought, `And the world's day closes ; Pale and fever-fraught, Sadly have I brought These blood-red Roses.'

"By his side the mother came Shudderingly creeping; The Devil's and the woman's heart Bitterly were weeping.

" Swift he came and swift he flew, Hopeless he reposes;

Waiting on is weary too,—

Wherefore on his grave we strew Bitter withering Roses.'

" The Devil gripped the woman's heart, With gall he staunched its bleeding ; Far away, beyond the day, The Lord heard interceding.

`Lord God, One in Three !

Sure Thy anger closes ; Yesterday I died, and see The Weary-winged over me Bitterly streweth Roses.'

"The voice cried out, 'Rejoice! rejoice!

There shall be sleep for evil!' And all the sweetness of God's voice Passed strangely through the Devil."

—of which it is, we suppose, the general drift to teach that the spirit of evil itself bewails the death of innocence, strews its grave with blossoms which represent something more than innocence, namely, love and the red life-blood of self-immola- tion, and strengthens that parent humanity which gave birth to innocence, so that it is able to endure its loss,—in return for which that childlike innocence which died but has recovered a transfigured life in a purer world, prays for the pardon of the spirit which has thus strewn its grave with the most perfect blossoms of beauty, and is assured that its prayer shall be heard. The rest among this cycle of poems are all in the same general strain, intended to hint that,— " All evil is defect ;

The limb deformed for common use of life Defect,—but haply in the line of growth."

—to which in general Mr. Buchanan seems to add that the body which limits the soul, and the physical aspects of the universe which limit our knowledge of God, are also what he deems moral evil, " defect, but in the line of growth,"—a creed which he works out with much depth and beauty, and, let us add, a creed in no way necessarily connected with his theory of moral evil. On the contrary, the only way in which we can explain the false interpretation which we so often put on mere " defect," is by supposing that there is in man a deep and direct sense of absolute responsibility and guilt, though without any means of measuring how mush of its appearance

in others is due to ' defect,' and how much to absolute sin. Of course, we cannot be expected to accord any very special admiration to the creed which Mr. Buchanan has chosen for poetic illustration, of which many articles appear to us false and shallow, nor is his method free from confusions and repetitions. Indeed, the poems themselves, subtle and powerful as they frequently are, convey little of that sense of rest in the mind of the poet which one would expect from an imaginative statement of a poet's heartfelt creed. On the contrary, they not unfrequently burn with the fever of Shelley's hectic effusions, and the Coruisken sonnets especially show alternations of mood which seem to us to break the design of the poem as far as we have apprehended it.

Still, taken as a whole, — and we must remember that the author himself asserts that this book is not only still partly unfinished, but when finished only a prelude to another

poem, which will embody more fully his conception of life,—the Book of Orm is certainly a striking attempt to combine a

quasi-Ossianic treatment of Nature with a philosophy of rebel- lion rising into something like a Pantheistic vision of the necessity of evil. Considered solely as poetry, and without any relation to its intellectual thesis, Mr. Buchanan appears to us to have succeeded in giving a thoroughly weird and ghostly effect to the whole series of poems, and, as we said in commencing, much more ghostly than spiritual. His quasi-physical conception both of moral evil and of God comes half-way, as it were, to meet his quasi- spiritual conception of the body and the universe, and the whole effect of the book is to represent the greater phenomena of the moral life, as a kind of weird involuntary motion of the mists and vapours on a mountain brow. In the following fine sonnet is con- tained as in a germ the spirit both of the philosophy and of the emotion of the whole volume :— "COEMSK.

"I think this is the very stillest place

On all God's earth, and yet no rest is here. The Vapours mimed in the black loch's face Drift on like frantic shapes and disappear; A never-ceasing murmur in mine ear Tells me of Waters wild that flow and flow. There is no rest at all afar or near, Only a sense of things that moan and go.

And lo ! the still small life these limbs contain I feel flows on like those, restless and proud ; Before that breathing nought within my brain Pauses, but all drifts on like mist and cloud; Only tho bald Peaks and the Stones remain, Frozen before Thee, desolate and bowed."

Mr. Buchanan might fairly have taken as his motto, along with the quotation from Lord Bacon, the two finest lines of this

sonnet,—

" There is no rest at all afar or near, Only a sense of things which moan and go."