AUTUMN SWALLOWS! THERE is a genuine passion and not a

little of vivid imagina- tion in this volume of lyrics, which seems to give us some measure of the inward force that has gone.to the making of Miss Ellice Hopkins's beneficent career. In one of the semi- -epigrammatic versicles with which Miss Hopkins fills a few of the pages of her book, she illustrates the saying that " the blood is the life " with characteristic vigour in words that might be taken as the motto of both her poetic and her unpoetic work

Yesterday's living sacrifice Is but to-day's dull carcase; rise, Nur dare to offer the All-living, death And dead decay ; But fresh life-blood pour out, and warm new breath Each new to-day."

Certainly, we may say of these lyrics that whatever some of them may want in distinctness of form, they never want the freshness of living feeling or wear the aspect of dead- alive emotion. Some of the poems are hardly clear enough to follow in detail, though one never misses the key-note of the whole. Indeed, the detail sometimes seems to confuse rather than to illustrate the meaning which we gather from the whole. But when Miss Hopkins succeeds, as she often does, in keeping all difficult detail out of her lyrics, they are often striking, from the depth and singleness of their feeling. Take, for example, the following, in which Miss Hopkins suggests the bewilder- ment with which an atom of vibrating air tossed to and fro in the whirlpools of song, might strive to understand and trace the law of its own motion, though it could discover nothing but an apparently purposeless flux and reflex, and this notwithstand- ing that all the time it was contributing to the expression of triumphant delight in victory over wrong :- " THE BONG.

Birth too and death, slumber and wakefulness, motion and immobility, crowned majesty and squalid filth, discordant clamour and the voice of gods.—EasecnocLEs.

An atom of air still hither and thither swung, Hither and thither tossed and aimlessly flung, Never at rest on the breath of a passionate song, A passionate song of-love and triumph o'er wrong, Poured from the trembling lips of the singer afire, Leaping like flame from the golden heart of the lyre, A passionate song of triumph! And ever it mused : By what law of my being perplexed and confused Am I tossed dins idly about, nor suffered to rest, Now in the gulf of the billow and now on its crest,

Hither and thither moved by a Hand in the dark,

Ever to random shocks a wandering mark, Ever impelled by forces that lie without, In a dance of death that ends in confusion and doubt, A rhythm of loss, an upward life in defeat, The onward turned back on itself with death for its beat.

And it searched out the laws of vibration, the boUnd and th' impact

Now swift and now slow ; and patiently traced out each fact

Of its being, how atom with atom ever must meet,

And the limits which still each upward movement defeat—

Impassable law that limits the freedom of each.

• Automat B.41 rofi. A Book of Lyrics. By Bibs Hopkins. London : Macmillan and Cu.

And still as far as the utmost science could reach Impulse it found in the lock of mechanical law, Nought in it all but a backward and forward saw, Opposite motions that ever each other defeat, Barren of progress or plan, left still incomplete.

But the song, the passionate song of triumph and love, That yet all the while like a living shuttle it wove, The passionate song of love and triumph o'er wrong, That conditioned the laws of its wonderful life all along, It knew not nor heard. For it was but a finite part ; And the song is the infinite whole, the throb of a Heart."

That has the ring of genuine poetry in it, as well as of genuine thought. Still more effective, perhaps, is the little lyric called " A Wave," in which Miss Hopkins expresses with beauty and force the constant death-in-life and life-in-death of all the nobler purposes of man, comparing. them to the continual breaking and re-forming of the ocean wave. That is not an uncommon metaphor, but it is not common to find it embodied with so much warmth and truth of feeling as it is in the beautiful little lyric we are about to quote. Indeed, we may notice throughout this volume a remarkable and passionate sympathy with that weakness which is strength in disguise, and that strength which almost prefers the form of weakness :— " A WAVE.

O Being in thy dissolution known Moat lovely then; 0 Life that ever has to die alone, To live again ; O bounding Heart that still must bow and break To tench thine end ; O broken Purpose that must failure take, And deathward bend, For the great tide to stretch from rock to rock His shining way ;

0 wandering Will that from the furthest shock

Of sea-deeps grey, Silver constraint of secret light on high Leads safe to shore ; O living Rapture that dost inly sigh, And evermore Within thy joy the wailful voices keep ; I see thee now, O Son of the unfathomable deep !

And trembling know The crowned Shadow of man's opposites, The forces dread That sway him into being, blanched with lights Of thunder bred ; A poised Passion wrought from central breath Of whirling storms,

And evermore a deathless life in death,

That still re-forms.

And thon, man's prototype in varying moods, Didst lonely beat The vacant shores and speechless solitudes With silver feet, Through the great mons wandering forlorn In search of him, As rose and fell like vacant flames, lone morn And evening dim, Ere light had grown articulate in love, Or silence knew Herself as worship. Then didst thou ever move Beneath the blue, An incommunicable mystery, About thy shore ; A visible yearning of the earth and sea, That evermore Flung out white arms to catch at some far good Yet unfulfilled, And failing sobbed and sank in solitude With heart anglified ; A voice that ever crying as of old In deserts dumb, With hollow tongue reverberate foretold A Life to come."

Miss Hopkins, however, is by no means always so clear and so musical as she is here. There are a few poems in which the expression seems to us forced and hard, though we do not doubt the depth of the feeling beneath. For instance, in the following attempt to compare the reality of life as it really is to a Gorgon face which turns to stone all those who look steadily upon it, unless their eyes are already so saturated with the splendour of a heavenly vision that the Medusa face is smitten "into night" by the glory within, we perceive a

too ambitious attempt to condense two very different trains of feeling into a single sonnet

MEDUSA.

Gaze thou upon the face, serenely bright, Of Him whose countenance is as the sun

Shining in midmost strength, ere yet is run His race of fire. Gaze, nor avert thy sight ; Shrink not for any bitterness of light,

Nor nightward fallings of thy soul, undone By heavenly lightnings till high use is won. So when Life's Gorgon face, with dread affright, Stoops close upon thy shuddering flesh, nor flee Thou must, but gaze, or fail in heavenward might, Fronting unblanched the freezing mystery : Then that dear Splendour stamped upon thy sight, May blur the deathful features, and for thee, Light-charmed, and safe, may smite them into night."

On the whole, real life is hardly to be fitly compared to a Medusa face. Nor is the spiritual vision of that divine splen- dour which is treated as the antidote to the vision of Life, one which can be obtained at all without a steady gaze on life itself. Hence, the sonnet is a bewildering one, which seems to fail of its effect, and only to leave us more perplexed than it found us. Doubtless, the vision of God is a cure for the para- lysing terrors of earthly views of life. But then, the vision of God is hardly ever gained except by those who begin, at least, by finding life no Medusa, but rather too full of beauty and charm. Miss Hopkins does not often give way to the wish to startle, but in this and a few of her other poems she attempts rather grim effects, which she seems to us to dash off too abruptly, and without taking sufficient pains to work out the complexity of her thought.

But we must not part from this little volume of lyrics, in which every thoughtful reader will find great pleasure, with fault-finding. We prefer to take leave of Miss Hopkins with a beautiful little poem on the loneliness of death, in which she seems to us at once perfectly simple, as well as impressive :- "` ;re 710IIRRAI SEITL..—Pascal. The silent chariot standeth at the door,

The house is hushed and still from roof to floor, None heard the sound of its mysterious wheels, Yet each its presence feels..

No champing bit, nor tramp of pawing feet, All dark and silent up and down the street, And yet thou may'st not keep it waiting there For one last kiss or prayer.

Thy words, with some strange Other interchanged, St,ike cold across us like loved eyes estranged, With things that are not fraught ; our things that are Fade like a sun-struck star.

And thou too weak and agonised to lift The cup to quench thy dying thirst, or shift Thy pillow, now without our help must rise, Nor wait our ministries.

Thou, loved and cherished, must go forth alone, None sees thee fondly to the door, not one ; No head is turned to see thee go ; we stay Where thou art not, and pray.

No panel bars thy white, resistless feet,

Our walls are mist to thee ; oat in the street It waits, it waits for thee, for thee alone : `Arise, let us begone !'

Alone, alone upon thine awful way !

Do any show thee kindness ? Any stay Thy heart ? Or does the silent charioteer Whisper, `Be of good cheer ?'

We know not. None may follow thee afar, None hear the sound of thy departing car. Only vast silence like a strong, black sea Rolls in 'twixt as and thee."

A considerable proportion of the lyrics in this little book touch as high a point as this,—one, that is, which only a power- ful character, and a character penetrated with true emotion, could attain.