MR. CANTON'S STUDY OF CHILDHOOD.*

Ma. CANTOS; is always delightful in his studies of childhood.

He has a special genius for interpreting that waywardness and vividness and changefulness in children which Mr.

Darwin would, we suppose, have regarded as the true equiva-

lent in conscious life of what may be called almost the habit of variation in nature,—if change itself can ever be a habit,—

which seems to be needful in order to provide the vast number of experiments in living that jostle each other till the most deeply rooted and beneficent can be selected. The little sketch of " W. V.'s " radiant childhood in this small book is very taking, though it cannot quite equal in originality and beauty "The Invisible Playmate." " W. V."

seems to be trying all sorts and modes of buoyant life in the hope of finding that which will be fullest of light and warmth. And these bright preludes to what we call life, though they have to be more or less laid aside for greater continuity and fixity of character as life goes on, con- stitute no doubt the true fascination of the child. The delight in soap-bubbles which Mr. Canton paints so happily is a perfect image of the child's joy in all the different gleams and glints and shadows of life which are the child's first mental playthings, and perhaps the best playthings that children ever possess, since they awaken the imagination and the affections far more effectually than their toys:-

" Oh, you who are sad at heart, or weary of thought, or irritable with physical pain, coax, beg, borrow, or steal a four- or five- year-old, and betake you to blowing bubbles in the sunshine of your recluse garden. Let the breeze be just a little brisk to set your bubbles drifting Fill some of them with tobacco smoke, and with the wind's help bombard the old fisherman [the spider] in his web. As the opaline globes break and the smoke escapes in a white puff along the grass or among the leaves, you shall think of historic battlefields, and muse whether the greater game was not quite as childish as this, and soref ully' less innocent. The smoke-charges are only a diversion ; it is the crystal balls which delight most. The colours of all the gems in the world ran molten through their fragile films. And what visions they con- tain for crystal gazers ! Among the gold and green, the rose and blue, you see the dwarfed reflection of your own trees and your own home floating up into the sunshine. These are your possessions, your surroundings—so lovely, so fairy-like in the bubble; in reality so prosaic and so inadequate when one considers the rent and rates. To W. V. the bubbles are like the wine of the poet—` full of strange continents and new discoveries.'

Flower of the sloe, WLen chance annuls the worlds we b'ow, Where does the soul of beauty in them go?'

With which we must take the charming little poem on the 3.tme subject:- " Our plot is small, but sunny limes Shut out all cares and troubles ; And there my little girl at times And I sit blowing bubbles.

The screaming swifts race to and fro, Bees cross the ivied paling, Draughts lift and set the globes we blow In freakish currents sailing.

They glide, they dart, they soar, they break. Oh, joyous little daughter, What lovely coloured worlds we make, What crystal flowers of water !

One, green and rosy, slowly drops; One soars and shines a minute, And carries to the limo-tree tops Our home, reflected in it.

The gable, with cream rose in bloom, She sees from roof to basement ; Oh, father, there's your little room!' She cries in glad amazement.

To her enchanted with the gleam, The glamour and the glory.

The bubble home's a home of dream, And I. must tell its story; Tell what we did, and how we played, Withdrawn from care and trouble— A father and his merry maid, Whose house was in a bubble !"

The best part of this little book,—the part that is devoted to " W. V." and her ways,—is full of the prismatic lights of child- hood, and it would be hardly possible to give any impression

• tr. V., Her Book and Various Verses. By William Canton. With 2 I In& (diens by C. B. Bock. Lo: don : 'shifter and Co.

of the charm of their quaint and wilful beauty without ex- tracting the whole. There is something infinitely attractive in childlike fancies when they are at once so gay and so

poetic as these. How could the sunlight which has given its colour to the crocus be better brought home to us than in :— "In the April sun at baby-house she plays. Her rooms are traced with stones and bits of bricks; For warmth she lays a hearth with little sticks, And one bright crocus makes a merry blaze !"

And how could the motherliness in a little girl, which is so early and marked a feature of most little girls that are worth anything, be more quaintly and happily expressed than in " The Sweet Pea"?-

" Oh, what has been born in the night To bask in this blithe summer morn P She peers, in a dream of delight,

Fur something new-made or new-born.

Not spider-webs under the tree, Not swifts in their cradle of mud, But—' Look, father, sweet Mrs. Pea Has two little babies in bud ! ' "

And then the fearlessness, and the sympathy of the child with even the most startling side of nature, are exquisitely ex- pressed in her conception that " thunder and lightning " are " great friends," for " they always come together," which is true enough of more kinds of thunder and lightning than one. They came together in the French Revolution. They came together in such beings as Alexander, or Dante, or Carlyle, so that the little girl's infantine poetry was not mere fancy, nor indeed in substance quite as bright as it seems. Sudden light is a sort of twin-brother to sudden sound, but each alike

indicates storm as well as that clearing of the air which the

storm brings.

We cannot say that Mr. Canton's poems on general subjects please us nearly as much as those on the bright and

wayward fancies of childhood. There is poetry, of course, in him, or he could not make the very essence of childhood so vivid and delightful to us; but when he travels beyond that region he is not so natural and simple as we should have expected. "The Comrades" is the most touching of these later poems. " Abba, Father," would be equally so, but the constant use of the "Abba " in the place of "Father " gives a certain mannerism to the poem which injures it, to our ears, as a perfect expression of natural religions feeling. " April

Voices" is beautiful, but Mr. Canton seems to us to be at his best when be speaks with the imaginative simplicity of a child. In his own verses he sometimes uses strange words. " Diorite" means, we believe, a kind of crystalline trap-rock.

But it is a geological expression quite unknown to the ordinary

dictionaries. The poem on the death of Cain is not a success, and though " Trafalgar " is spirited, it is what almost any of our minor poets might have written, while Mr. Canton at his best writes what no one else writes, for he has the keen vision of a man for the happy dreamy, not too steadfast, heart of a brilliant child.