FO'C'S'LE YARNS.*

Tins volume consists of four stories. in verse, suplass ' be told by an old Manx seaman, Tom Baynes, to his shipmates at sea, and which depict with singular vividness the life of the rough fishermen and peasants of the Isle of Man. . The book is anonymous ; but a dedication to Manxmen informs us that the author is himself a native of the island. This, indeed, is evident enough ; it is plain that every page is fed by personal memories. The book is—it must be—the outcome of the intimate personal intercourse of childhood with the class which it describes. Whatever the author's present position or avocations may be, we can hardly be wrong in saying that he is still a Manx fisherman, or a Manx farmer, or a Manx parson, at heart.

Few books have more exactly illustrated how far Wordsworth's famous recipe for genuineness in poetry, taken in its literal shape, will carry as. "Betsy Lee" is veritably what "The Affliction of Margaret" is not, such an utterance as might really break from, a man of the people, under the influ- ence of strong emotion, which gives inflexion and pathos to his speech. There is all the impress of reality, of naive and simple dignity, which each an utterance might possess ; there is as much of the charm of poetry as can, in fact, be conceived as welling up in so rude a heart,' and there is nothing beyond or inconsistent with this. This'is as much as to say—and Words- worth's practice, though not his theory, admitted it—that there can be little here of high or condensed poetry, little that is abso- lutely remesnberable and complete. What Wordsworth, in such poems as "Ruth," has added, the author of "Betsy Lee" has not had, perhaps, either the power or the wish to add. But * Fo'c'sle Yarns, including Betsy Lec,.and Other POMO. Landon: Macmillan.

what there actually is beneath the Manx sailor's rough bosom, he has given us ; and that includes much of humour, much of • pathos, much of a strong, homely recurrence to primal instincts„ and the crude elements of our being.

And there is a certain pleasure in being thus brought back to

the source of things; in realising this childish delight in tho- rough rudiments of existence on the breezy shores ; in the shock

of wind and weather, and the mingling of sands and sea, a delight, may we say, such as that which our supposed Ascidian ancestors may have experienced in the alternations of low and high water ; in the basking hours of the ebb-tide, and the

dashing freshness of its flow, :—

" Now, the beauty of the thing when childher plays is, The terrible, wonderful length the days is. Up you jumps, and out in the sun, And you fancy the day will never be done; And you're ohasin' the bumbees hummin' so cross,. In the hot, sweet air among the goes;

Or gath'rin' bluo.belle, or lookin' for eggs ;

Or poltin' the ducks, with their yalla legs ;

Or a elimbin', and nearly breakiti your skulls ;.

Or a shoutin' for divilment after the gulls ; Or a thinkin' of nothite, but down at the tide,. Singin' out for the happy you feel inside. That's the way with the kids, you know,

And the years do come and the years do go;

And when you look back, it's all like a puff, Happy and over, and short enough."

This freshness of view naturally suggests many touches off humour, such humour as is contained in the quaint observa- tions of a child, on whom the familiar contrasts between human profession and achievement strike newly, and like discoveries of his own. Here, for instance, is a comparison for persons too' easily satisfied with the mixedness of human things :— "Like ould Jemmy the Red, that drove to the packet, One hose would go forrit and the other backit,— ' Dear me !' the piople said ; 'There's nothing puffeck,' says Jemmy the Red."

What mildness is here in the popular remonstrance, what complacent conclusiveness in the charioteer's reply But let us try Tom Baynes in a higher mood. Let us take the feeling which gives its beauty to the tale of "Christmas Rose," the dog-like adoration of a nature recognised as

measurably above our own. "Christmas Rose is the name given to a baby saved from a Spanish ship wrecked at. Christmas time on one of the southern headlands of the Isle of Mat. A negro swimming with the child in his teeth was the

one -of the crew who reached the shore ; he died of the exertion, and the girl's parentage was never known. She was.

brought up by the " Pazon " (parson) of the village, along with his two sons, like a child of his own. But her blood was nobler, her beauty more queenly, her nature rarer and higher, than than that of any of the simple folk around her, and the story

dwells mainly on the different ways in which each of those who,

came near her regarded the strangely eidled maid, First, we. have the simple, fatherly affection of the " Pazon,"— " With the love and the light, And the strength and the strain of his soul's desire, All round the child like a glory of fire."

Then come the " Pazon's " two sons, who both of them fall in love with her in vain, and both come to a tragic end. But Tom. Baynes' own feeling for her is a worship quite unmixed with any personal hope. Giving to old hyperboles a homely reality, he calls her his queen, he compares her to the pictures which have penetrated his untutored soul with a sense of aloofness and sanctity :—

You've seen them *then the Romans has got — Marelenners they calls them,—women; what ?

Wouien, aye! with the blood in their veins, And life and love, and the way they straius Their eyes to a height that's far above them I' Who can look on them, and not love thorn?

Whoever made the likes o' them, Their feet was in Jerusalem . . . .

TIlat's the sort,—a woman lifted To heaven, with a breast like snow that's sifted;. And a eye that's fixed on God hisself- Now, where's your wivin' and thrivin' and pelf P And sweethearts and widdies well stocked with the rhino Ah ! that's the thing likest God that I know."

It is to be hoped that the progress of democratic manners will not soon destroy all traces of this spirit of dog-like reverence,— a reverence which is founded on a true perception at once of the

vast difference of the heights to which human souls may rise, and of the depth of the roots which, nevertheless, unite thorn. Another passage, describing the girlhood of Christmas Rose,