MR. RODEN NOEL'S POEMS.* WE can very well believe that,

as Mr. Noel tells us somewhere in this volume, few of Nature's children love her as he loves her. And this love gives him a genuine poetical inspiration, an inspiration which, were he less of an improvisatore and more of an artist, might give him a definite place among poets. His diction is, indeed, overloaded with ornament, glitters with gems, colours, and flowers, till the simple charm of natural images is sometimes almost overpowered ; besides this, the mechanical execution of the poems is now and then slovenly in a most extraordinary degree, so slovenly that one would think, were it not for proofs to the con- trary to be found in the same volume, that the author knows nothing of the laws of language and of versification, or that, like Horace's friend, he writes his two hundred verses standing on one foot. Yet in spite of these faults he is capable on occasion of writing noble passages. Take this, for instance, from " Palingenesis :"—

" Nature, refreshed, unwearied, every spring Awakes to bodings inarticulate,

As from a myriad mouths of budding boughs, Tuning her instrument, and preluding Her full triumphant symphony of summer, And autumn's deep tempestuous ocean hymn ; Her man hymeneal of bleat lives Of sea, and mountain-storm, and swinging pine ; Forest that rings with acclamation rare From beast, and bird, and myriad living things, Tumultuous leaves and ecstacies of bloom ; With man, a reed through whom the Hidden One Breathes forth this anthem of the Universe I " Lead then, 0 year, thy bright procession forth, Light clouds along caBimlean clear skies And revels of fair flowers along the earth, Dancing to softest music of mild airs, Simmer of rills in sunny summer showers, Mingled with flutes and flageolets of birds !

Roll tides of glory round about our dead, Dead in the deep recurrence of thy smile, Dead in the rhythmic breathing of thy breast ! 0 season ! as with blare of trumpet-call Shock all the blood of every youthful thing To bound for battle and sublime emprise ; Prick to endeavour, gird as to endure ; Inform with winged seeds all ambient airs, Inform all creatures with a hallowed heat, Dissolve them languorous in sweet desire, Yea, flush them full with dear delicious 8re Inform the spiritual air of souls With serviceable knowledge and device, With germs of generous impulse and resolve,

With deed the fruit, and fantasy the flower."

Now this is not by any means blameless. In line 2, " boding's" is not the word- wanted, which should be one expressive of messages of joy; the epithet in " acclamation rare" fulfils no possible function except completing the line ; and the phrase, "dissolve them languorous in sweet desire," jars against the tone of the whole passage. Still it has meaning, elevation, and a great dignity of rhythm which suits the thought. The writer has more than that love of nature which spends itself on the beauty of form and colour ; he is alive to that more spiritual emotion which connects the aspects of outward nature with the aspirations of the human soul. Nor is he without the sensuous love of nature. The poem called " The Water-Nymph and the Boy," for which Mr. Noel might have quoted in the story of Hylas a more exact parallel than his legend of the Black Forest (the German water-spirits are rather mischievous than loving), shows an eye keenly appreciative of beauty and colour. The poem displays throughout a delicate fancy which finds, on the whole, an adequate expression in Mr. Noel's language. Still this fatal habit of hurrying over work, this strange distaste to the labour of correc- tion, comes in to mar the effect. Is it possible to imagine that Mr. Noel can ever have read again the two couplets which we are about to quote, and let them stand as they are ?—

" 0 the beautiful butterflies

That flatter where the runnel flies !

* The lied Flag, and other Poems. By the Hon. Roden Hod. London: Strahan and Co. 1872.

Silverly glistening over stones Where yonder nightingale intones."

Barely few things are less similar than " intoning " and the night- ingale's song, and we wonder that the very printer did not cry out- against a runnel " flying."

Again, in " At Court," which is for the most part a graceful' and pathetic expression of personal feeling, how it jars on one's. feelings to find a phrase so ludicrous as this :—

" Beautiful now as when she blew About my boyish prime."

We talk, but scarcely write, of flowers " blowing ;" we neither write nor talk of human beings " blowing ; " that an educated man should use the word " blew " of either is almost incredible.

We cannot think that Mr. Noel is happy when he passes into regions of thought. Most of his poems are philosophical, and he has not acquired the art of expressing philosophy with lucidity and grace. The beat, perhaps, is " A Christian's Funeral," where the subject, so old and yet so eternally new, of the doubt of an hereafter which the heart never can help feeling in the presence of death, and the hope which triumphs or seeks to- triumph over it. But it is when he gets into politics that Mr. Noel shows himself at his worst. The piece called "The Red' Flag," from which the volume is named, and for which, therefore; a certain pre-eminence would seem to be claimed by the author, is not in any sense of the word a poem. That it is passionately unjust, that its wrath rises into a shrill hysterical scream without dignity or force ; that it cannot fail; so far as it has any influence,. at all, to perpetuate the hatred which it denounces, are faults- which, serious as they are, do not concern the artistic character- of the work. If Mr. Noel had inveighed against the party of " Order," against oligarchs, millionaires, and priests, in that well- wrought verse which has a keener edge than the most vigorous prose, we could have admired it, but what are we to say of mush a couplet as this :— "Men who were fain to shrink before the foeman Can hustle at least and mangle theii own women !"

Or to such ill-jointed stuff as this ?— " Hark ! to the huge bell, whose portentous boom

Ponderous falling fills the soul with doom.

Lo I surging human seas arise and fall Around the lurid grandeur of St. Paul Torches illume their wild convulsive toils, Windily flaring ; all around there boils Vile human refuse, for the dainty spoils They have wrung from others wrangling fierce and hoarse- All I turn away with what a hideous force

They soil our beautiful, both body and soul—

Famished beasts bursting loose from our control.

They pour the life of venerable age ; Infants and women perish in their rage ! . . . .

. . . . Then must avenging butchery begin : Their sin we strangle with our stronger sin.

England must join the anarchic devil's dance, That wilders and exhausts delirious France I "

"Fart indignatio versum," but if it cannot make better verse than this, it had better be silent ; possibly, while it grows articulate, it may also grow less unjust. We should be sorry to part from Mr. Noel with so adverse a criticism, and we will therefore quote a passage where his indignation is both just and well expressed.. It is from a poem called " Allerheiligen," from a ruin in the Black Forest

But lo ! upon the apsidal wall, Unseen till now, a monster scrawl— Some graceless living creature's name Sprawling portentous, and the same, When you look nearer, far and nigh Defiling all the sanctuary All 1 many a life's all-hallowed spot, Deep with dewy forget-me-not ; Many a heart's elysian bower, Dearly alive with passion-flower, Knows the intrusion of a stare, Feels foul feet of a common care : Mene, mane,' scrawled with fire, Insults our saintliest desire ; Our holiest hopes are desecrate With the world till they lie desolate !. Yea, many a shrine Where souls incline Lies waste like Allerheiligen I "