SOME VOLUMES OF VERSE.* IT is not for the first

time that we have complained of the task which recurs from time to time of critically estimating the minor verse of the day. The stream flows on with a fairly equal current; however other kinds of literature may vary in quantity, this is constant. A rate of two volumes for every week is below the mark. The subjects of this present review have been chosen out of a mass of volumes numbering between forty and fifty, and containing together some fifty or sixty thousand lines. It has been a melancholy business to make this selection, not only on account of the quality of the books read—and it must be said that whatever merits minor verse may have, it is sadly lacking in interest—but because of the inevitable reflection on the waste of power and the disappoint- ment which it implies. Very few of these volumes are wholly without merit. The verse, even of the poets whose efforts we cannot notice, is commonly correct and often fluent; now and then there is a good line, sometimes several good lines together, though never a wholly good piece; there are touches of fancy, and sometimes even of imagination; now and then there is a thought; but the general impression left is too often of weakness, monotony, dulness.

Miss Nora Hopper, who thanks nearly a score of editors for permission to reprint her Songs of the Morning, has certainly caught the ear of the public, and may fairly claim to have ob- tained, if the academic Metaphor may be allowed, a "class" rather than a "pass." More we do not feel able to say. She writes with ease, but with something of the slovenliness which is the besetting sin of the easy writer. Take the first poem, on which one would suppose all the care and skill available to have been expended. "I have doffed my snowy, shining, satin wear," says the bride. But what a word to use is "wear"! It belongs to dressmakers' slang. The rules of English verse are not so strict as of French, in which the vocabulary is rigidly limited, but this word is impossible in serious verse,— for we have not, of course, forgotten "Motley's the only wear." In the same piece, which contains thirty-four lines only, we find these rhymes, doubtful, or worse : "falter, altar " ; "bosom, blossom" (twice) ; "shadow, meadow." A little further on, in " One Way of Love," we find this couplet :— " Yours is a rarer colour than one traces On a dove's breast, or in the windflowers' faces." Surely " traces " is a very prosaic word, which would not have been used except as a convenient rhyme to "faces," itself not a phrase that is worth any sacrifice. It might be possible to speak of the " face " of a flower. If "a rose of Gulistan " may be figured with a "veil" (" The Princess," IV.), she might be said to have a "face," but then the rose is highly per- sonified ; we could not say the same of an anemone. This is petty criticism, it may be said; but it is not a criticism to which the great poets are open. They never write such things. Browning is strange, but he is never weak. He is always master of his metre, though he sometimes seems to treat it very roughly. But our readers shall see our poet at her best :—

" THE SAMPHIRE GATHERER.

The samphire gatherer to the cliff-face clings Halfway 'twixt sky and Sea: She has but youth and courage for her wings, And always Death about her labour sings, And fain would loosen steady hand or knee, And cast her down among life's broken things, But danger shakes with fitful murmurings No such brave heart as she.

• (1.) Songs of the Morning. By Nora Hopper. London : Grant Richards. .) The Ascent of Man. By Mathilde Blind. London : T. Fisher tinwtn. Ros. 6d.]=—(3.) The Prince. By Adolphus A. Jack. London : Macmillan and Co. (Ss. 6d. net.)—(4.) Dolcino: a Tragedy. By William Gerard. London : Kegan Paul, Trench, and Co. (38. net.]—(5.) sea Drift. By Grace Ellery Channing. Landon: Kegan Paul, Trench, and Co. [6s.]—(6.)

Poona. "Ind New. • By Frederic George Scott. Toronto : W. Briggs.

—(7.) . By H. Cumberland Bentley. London : A. L. Humphreys. Oa]

The gulls are crying in her 'heedless ears That strength is made a mock

At grips with the great sea. She has no fears. But treads with naked feet the stair of rock That has but known for years on weary years The touch of sea-gulls' wings, the sea that rears Her waves against it with recurrent shock, The sun that burns and sears.

She has no fears because her daily bread She sees made manifest Here in the pendulous weed that tempts her tread Upon so wild and dangerous a quest. The samphire sways and dangles overhead And home is far below ; and in that nest Are little hungry mouths that must be fed, Though Danger be her neighbour and her guest.

Night brings her little children to her knee For daily bread to pray; Their father tosses on the open sea, Where flashing shoals of silver dolphins play.

But hungry mouths must feed while he's away,

So the brave mother clambers day by day,

And pulls the samphire trails, and knows not she

Is of that school of saints that wear no bay, But do God's work the still and splendid way."

One word we feel constrained to add. We cannot but think that now and then a little more restraint in the matter of warmth and colour would have been more in keeping with the better literary tradition.

That Miss Mathilde Blind should have fallen below the "height of her great argument" was inevitable. With all her activity of mind and not unfrequent originality of thought, she lacked the power of expression, never more needed than when philosophy has to be accommodated to verse. Almost all writers who have essayed the task have failed. Lucretius himself has long passages which are distinguished from prose only by their metrical form. If Tennyson succeeds it is because he never forgets the limitations of his art. Mathilde Blind sings of evolution, and has won the praise of one of the great teachers of the doctrine, Dr. Alfred R. Wallace. It would be only too easy to ridicule the poem, as Canning ridiculed a poem not altogether unconnected with the subject, Dr. Darwin's "Loves of the Plants." Indeed it is impossible to avoid an occasional smile at the incongruous collocations of words to which Miss Blind finds herself driven. But it is a serious work undertaken in a serious spirit, and not without passages of strength and dignity. Here, for instance, are two stanzas in which the messages of the painter and the poet are rot inadequately given :—

" New spirit-yearnings for a heavenlier mood Call for a love more pitiful and tender, And 'neath the painter's touch blooms forth in splendour The image of transfigured motherhood. All hopes of all glad women who have smiled

In adoration on their first-born child

Here smile through one glad woman made immortal; All tears of all sad women through whose heart

Has pierced the edge of sorrow's sevenfold dart

Lie weeping with her at death's dolorous portal.

For in married hues whose splendour Bodies forth the gloom and grandeur Of life's pageant, tragic, tender, Common things transfigured flush By the magic of the brush, As when sun-touched raindrops glow, Blent in one harmonious bow.

But see, he comes, Lord of life's changeful shows, To whom the ways of Nature are laid bare,

Who looks on heaven and makes the heavens more fair,

And adds new sweetness to the perfumed rose; Who can unseal the heart with all its tears, Marshal loves, hates, hopes, sorrows, joys, and fears In quick procession o'er the passive pages; Who has given tongue to silent generations And wings to thought, so that long-mouldered nations May call to nations o'er the abyss of ages: The poet, in whose shaping brain Life is created o'er again With loftier raptures, loftier pain ; Whose mighty potencies of verse Move through the plastic Universe, And fashion to their strenuous will The world that is creating still."

We are inclined to think that there is as much good verse in the two dramas on our list, Mr. A. A. Jack's Prince and Mr- William Gerard's Dolcino, as in any other two volumes. But they have not the elements of success in them. Neither of the protagonists, the schemer Francisco or the zealot

Dolcino, convinces us; nor does either story unfold itself in a

really dramatic fashion. Here is a specimen from each, and both might easily be matched :— From The Prince.

"He is blest who knows The sun's heat and the puff of mellow air Are not more general in their wide effect Than this same warm and each-man-suiting love. He's weary, and upon the living grass Lies down to bathe i' the sun : she who has yet Scarce even a child's thought for the careful day. Laughs with the wind and dances idly happy : So unlike are we found, the same things find us Most different. 'Tis certain there are those Who, when they hear the equal trumpet blown Bidding an end, compose themselves half-smiling To see the cheating curtain unroll and open On dateless life ; while others, Eastern waifs, Tossed by the current of commerce upon our shores, Fear most lest death deceive, and are delighted When they have hope to cease."

From Dolcino.

"Be my heart still! Inconscient creature, as things noblest are, For there the world's hope lies. Thought is so cold, And striving dimly from this hither side Unlocks the maze of sunless mysteries, And roams, a terror, through deserted streets Where loveless mind reigns lord—but if there spring The heart that through the woman throbs in man, To warm that cold of thought, 0 then, despite All craven doubts, against the seeming bounds And adamantine curbs of truth itself, Full on the dark of that which seems despair, Immortal image understood in time,

The rain-bow city gleams !"

Miss Channing's Sea Drift has an unmistakable note of feeling in it. We do not wholly sympathise with her literary emotions as she expresses them in " Byron " or "Walt Whitman," but we recognise the force and genuineness of the expression which she gives to them. Here is the second of the two. The news of the poet's death has come to the singer among the Tuscan hills :—

"But L—I let the laurel pass,

And pass, the dim Etrurian land; Far louder sing within my hand The voiceless syllables of grass. Your music keeps its mighty ring, 0 ancient groves of Tuscany ! But tenfold eloquent to me

The common herb One taught to sing. Green art thou, laurel overhead, Yet sombre to this tiny blade, And some one says that he who made The grass and me to live, is dead. It may be true,—for Italy Hath seen the night of many a sun ; Thou, 0 my Country, hadst but one, If set, bow dim thy light must be ! It may be false,—the sky's as blue, The ilex hath not dropped a leaf Nor Earth put off a rose for grief, And yet, for all,—it may be true. Unruffled, silver olives wave,

Loud sings the laurel where I pass, But louder still I hear the grass,— The grass, new-growing on a grave."

The volume has three divisions, of which the second, mostly concerned with Italian themes, is the best. But there is some finely finished work in all. Miss Charming does not come before us with any literary antecedents, except, indeed, in her name, and, we believe, in her ancestry, but there is much promise in her verse, and not a little performance.

We cannot give to Mr. Scott's Poems, Old and New, more than a word. We have, unless our memory deceives us, noticed his work at some past time. "The Unnamed Lake," which gave a title to an earlier volume, has the look of an old acquaintance. It has, anyhow, the most charac- teristic quality of Mr. Scott's verse, the love of Nature in the broad aspects which it presents in his native land of Canada.

Of Mr. Cumberland Bentley's Poems we should have thought better if he had given us the "Part I., Lays and

Ballads" only. Any one—so to speak—can write a "love poem," but a spirited hunting ballad after the manner of Whyte Melville, with whose "In Memoriam" Mr. Bentley begins his volume, is the outcome of a rarer gift. There is plenty of room for improvement ; there is also an unmistakable Tis in some of these pieces. They interest us, and this, to come back to our starting point, is a saving grace in Minor pOetry.