BOOKS.

THE UNKNOWN EROS, AND OTHER ODES.*

Tins remarkable volume of poems, which appears without preface or the author's name, is singularly unlike much of the poetry which has of late years appeared among us. Against that of the Epicurean order, of which we have had too much, it may almost be regarded as a protest. It consists of a series of poems, most of them odes, in the stricter sense of the term, others in a laxer sense, embodying trains of very lofty and occasion- ally of somewhat mystical thought, in subtle, expressive, and musical language. Their chief characteristics are continuity of meditation and richness of illustrative imagery, but they also abound in passion, that is, passion in its intellectual and imagina- tive, not its sensuous form. The poem implies that the author of the book does not expect a large audience at the present time :— "Therefore no plaint be mine

Of listeners none, No hope of rendered use or proud reward, In hasty times and hard ; But chants as of a lonely thrush's throat At latest eve, That does in each calm note Both joy and grieve ; Notes few and strong and fine, Gilt with sweet day's decline, And sad with promise of a different sun.'

These Odes are written not in stanzas, but in an irregular metre, varying from very short to very long lines, the elastic modulations of which are in harmony with thoughts which rise and fall obedient to no external law, and yet, like the cadences of an iEolian harp, follow a law of their own. The poem which gives its name to the volume, "The Unknown Eros," may be cited as an example :—

" 0 Unknown Eros, sire of awful bliss,

What portent and what Delphic word, Such as in form of snake forbodes the bird, Is this ?

In me life's even flood What eddies thus?

What in its ruddy orbit lifts the blood Like a perturbed moon of Uranus Reaching to some great world in unganged darkness hid ; And whence This rapture of the sense Which, by thy whisper bid, Reveres with obscure rite and sacramental sign A bond I know not of, nor dimly can divine; This subject loyalty which longs For chains and thongs Woven of gossamer and adamant, To bind me to my unguessed want, And so to lie, Between those quivering plumes that through floe ether pant For hopeless, sweet eternity?"

The doctrine adumbrated in this poem is more distinctly illustrated in several other odes, which, if not to be called "love-poems," are yet expositions of the philosophy of love. The most import- ant of these is entitled, " Delicite Sapientiaa de Amore." According to its teaching, Love is so closely connected with Reverence, that each might bear the other's name. It says of the lover :—

" How envies he the ways Of yonder hopeless star, And so would laugh and yearn With trembling lids eterne, Ineffably content from infinitely far Only to gaze On his bright Mistress's responding rays,, That never know eclipse; And, once in his long year, With prseternuptial ecstacy and fear, By the delicious law of that ellipse Wherein all citizens of ether move, With hastening pace to come Nearer, though never near, His Love And always inaccessible sweet Home ; There on his path doubly to burn, Kiss'd by her doubled light That whispers of its source, The ardent secret ever clothed with Night Then go forth in new force Towards a new return, Rejoicing as a Bridegroom on his course."

This Palace of Love looks so like a Temple of Vesta, that it is only fair to state that it flings its gates open to all who have either retained or recovered the first brightness of the soul, to,- * 27e Unknown Eros, and other Odes. Loudon: BeU and Bone.

"The wedded few that honour in sweet thought And glittering will, So freshly from the garden gather still The lily sacrificed ;"

—and to those not less in whom,— " Living Love yet blushes for dead shame.

There of pure Virgins, none Ie fairer seen, Save one, Than Mary Magdalene."

Despite a few passages to which the term " ascetic " or " Platonic" will be applied by some, the affections celebrated in this book, while spiritual, are eminently human also. Not out of harmony with this poem is an ode of a severer order, singing the praises of "Pain." A self-indulgent age like ours will be little disposed to such a philosophy. It might, notwithstanding, find its capacities for joy indefinitely increased if it adopted that philosophy, even to the moderate extent of not hunting its pleasures to death, and not shrinking from what slight endurance is implied in the most 'obviously necessary self-sacrifice. The ode thus begins :—

"0 Pain! Love's mystery,

Close next of kin To joy and heart's delight, Low Pleasure's opposite, Choice food of sanctity, And medicine of sin, Angel, whom even they that will pursue Pleasure with hell's whole gust Find that they must Perversely woo, My lips, thy live coal touching, speak thee true.

Thou sear'st my flesh, 0 Pain, Bat brand'st for arduous peace my languid brain, And bright'nest my dull view, Till I, for blessing, blessing give again, And my roused spirit is Another fire of bliss, Wherein I learn, Feelingly, how the pangful purging fire Shall furiously burn With joy, not only of assured desire, But also present joy, Of seeing the life's corruption, stain by stain, Vanish in the clear heat of Love irate, And, fume by fume, the sick alloy Of luxury, sloth, and hate Evaporate ; Leaving the man, so dark erewhile, The mirror merely of God's smile."

These are specimens of a style of poetry now rare among us. Occasionally it reminds us of Crashaw, though the resem- blance is less than the dissimilarity, his exaggerated quaintnesses never occurring, while his rich diction and impassioned metri- cal cadences are combined with a larger imagination and with deeper thought. By many the work will be called obscure. Against several of the poems that charge may, we think, be justly brought, though by no means against all those which for their appreciation require both cultivated minds and careful attention. " Obscurity " is a word with many meanings. Obscure poetry of one kind suggests the idea that the author has acquired a trick of "thinking in shorthand" (if the phrase be permissible), and forgets that the reader has never been initiated into the mystery of his abbreviations. Under these circumstances, whole pages are studied with a painful doubt on the reader's part as to whether he may not be suffering from an incipient softening of the brain ; and when the meaning has been expounded, another puzzle arises, viz., why such every-thy thoughts might not have been intelligibly expressed. This is not the darkness found in some of these poems. A different sort of obscurity is one which rises mainly Out of the recondite nature of the themes. It exists not seldom in the poetry of Wordsworth and Coleridge, who would pro- bably have pleaded in their defence the example of Dante. This is the obscurity which occasionally marks the work before rte. In referring it mainly to the themes selected, we cannot, however, clear the author from responsibility in the matter. He has not always borne in mind that where the subject of a poem is abstruse there is the more need that the language should be as unequivocal as words can be made. Where the topic is familiar, the reader's guess—a thing far more often necessary than is commonly known—at once interprets the doubtful ex- preasion ; but where the reader deals with a profound subject, or one new to him, he must follow, not correct his guide. A doubtful "antecedent," a word that may be used either as a verb or a substantive, or an allusion not explained, any one of these accidents may turn the reader's feet into labyrinthine paths, and add to the perplexities of a journey which at best must be often under shade. Unfortunately it is especially when writing on philosophical themes that a poet becomes so pre-

occupied by his own thoughts that he forgets those "hooks and eyes" of style then especially necessary. The author sees to much besides to see, unaided, where his reader will halt ; and his monitor should be one largely qualified by the two great gifts of dullness and frankness. He is a captious reader who quarrels with occasional obscure passages in meditative poetry, but the general scope of a poem should always be plain. It will otherwise lose in passion and power, as well as in light.

Several of these poems are political. In them obscurity is banished by an ardour which will be appreciated alike by those who sympathise with the opinions expressed and those who dissent from them. Here is a protest against the " peace-at-any-price " school :—

"Remnant of Honour, brooding in the dark

Over your bitter cark, Staring, as Rispah stared, astonied, seven days, Upon the corpses of so many sons, Who loved her once, Dead in the dim and lion-haunted ways, Who could have dreamed That times should come like these I Prophets indeed taught lies when we were young, And people loved to have it so ; For they teach well who teach their scholar's tongue But that the foolish both should gaze, With feeble, fascinated face, Upon the wan crest of the coming woe, The billow of earthquake underneath the seas, And sit at ease, Or stand agape, Without so much as stepping back to 'scape, In such an hour, When eager hands are fettered and too few, And hearts alone have leave to bleed, Speak ; for a good word then is a good deed."

The following is a statement respecting one side of a matter which has also another and a very different side. It is Milton who says of certain pretenders,—

" Licence they mean when they cry Liberty.'" And apparently it is in the same spirit that the author of these Odes denounces a certain Janus-faced phantom, which rises before his ken over the troubled horizon of European civilisation, —a Power which, seen from one side, is Jacobinism or Com- munism, and seen from the other is Cmarism. Against this portent he invokes the aid of the inactive Good, who, depressed or apathetic, meet the claims of public duty with Dante's "gran rifiuto :"— " Ye outlawed Best, who yet are bright

With the sunken light, Whose common style Is Virtue at her gracious ease, The flower of olden sanctities, Ye haply trust, by love's benignant guile, To lure the dark and selfish brood To their own hated good ;"

At the same time, he warns this class of meditative mourners that it is no longer for them,—

" To guide The great ship helmless on the swelling tide Of that presumptuous Sea, Unlit by sun or moon, yet inly bright With lights innumerable that give no light, Flames of corrupted will and scorn of right, Rejoicing to be free."

The poet will doubtless admit that the abuses arising from pre- scriptive tyranny are not less fatal to man's best interests, and among others, to poetry and every manly art, than are the crimes enacted by false liberty, and again, that each evil produces the other. His themes, though they do not include this particular one, are very numerous, slender as is his volume, and we have thought that we should serve our readers best by letting his poetry speak largely for itself. Not unlike the last poem quoted is one called the "Standards," replete with eloquence and energy admirably combined with thought ; and it makes a fearless and generous protest against one of the worst forms of tyranny, viz., that of "the Hohenzollern hoof," at present set upon the religious freedom of Germany. Our limits permit us only to refer the reader to a class of poems different in character from those illustrated by our extracts, poems with nothing in them of mystical thought or fiery expression, but finely characterised by knowledge of human nature, and a reflective vein, pathetic, yet not desponding, which will remind some readers of Wordsworth's lines :—

4g Wisdom is oft-times nearer when we stoop Than when we soar."

Among these are the poems entitled, "Let Be," "Victory in Defeat," "The Toys," " Tristitia," "If I were • Dead," "Remembered Grace," and "Faint, yet Pursuing."