498 Showers soft and steaming, the north-easter should be more parpass, ticularly under divine guidance, we confess we do not understand; except, indeed, that the poet is thereby assisted to a fitting rhyme and a forcible finish. We notice what is obviously a very subordinate blemish, because we think that Mr. Kingsley is prone to make use of this and similar forms of expression. In the poem named The Outlaw, a poacher, for instance, justifies his occupation 'I do but hunt God's cattle upon God's ain hills." No doubt there has been, alike in our literature and in the other forms of our social intercourse, too marked a line of demarkation drawn between things sacred and things profane; but we doubt whether the miscellaneous application of our Maker's name be the right way to cure this, or to induce a simpler, or more constant and reverent recognition of that divine life in which we live, and move, and have our being. We are fault-finding, and we wish to quit this part of our task as soon as may be. So let us at once suggest to Mr. Kingsley that the form of one of his poems, Saint Maura-a very powerful and striking poem in many respects--is open to certain rather serious objections. We do not speak of the sentiments the Saint expresses: for what a saint should or should not say under the circumstances, is a matter on which we do not pretend to speak with authority. But we are disposed to object to the "situation." Saint Maura is being crucified alongside her husband; and to wile away the hours till dawn for him, she utters a discourse which occupies some twelve or fourteen pages of moderate-size print. Now, we do not absolutely affirm that it would be impracti cable for any poet to make this subject attractive, or a fit theme for artistic delineation. Even Shakspeare, however, with his intense dramatic energy, would have hesitated to employ it; and if he had ventured, the pained shape of the martyr-girl would have been lightly indicated rather than drawn in full. Most of us have read Mr. Aytoun's Bothwell; and most of us have felt that, as the soliloquy of a man chained in a dungeon, its construction is open to a fatal objection, which the most careful and skillful recasting of parts (and we are bound to own Why, in preference to the winds which that the last edition is an immense imcome from the other points of the com-provement on its predecessors) can not Through the snow-storm hurled, Blow, thou wind of God!" A most vigorous discourse-with the exception, indeed, of the last line, which we do not like: "Blow, thou wind of God!" breath And blaze of all the garden slopes below, And round the shining rivers, and the peaks But a vivid and spirited description of Otherwise the book, as already intimated, is eminently healthy. Nor do we except from this verdict the political songs, some of which might be thought to indicate a certain morbidness in the way that social evil and injustice are looked at. But they indicate, as we think, nothing of the kind.. They are the natural expression of a very indignant, but of a perfectly healthy mind. There is no dejection, denot to be destroyed, but restored; and spondency, nor moodiness. The world is the strong heart and the brawny arm are ready to aid the restoration: "Forward! Hark, forward's the cry! One more fence and we're out on the open, So to us at once, if you want to live near us! Hark to them, ride to them, beauties! as on they go, Leaping and sweeping away in the vale below! Cowards and bunglers, whose heart or whose eye is slow Find themselves staring alone." There is a scriptural simplicity, a grave severity, in certain of these pieces, which remind us of the old preachers of the Covenant; stern, sour-visaged, iron-handed men, who in the retirement of healthy country manses girded on the sword of the Lord and of Gideon, and went out to 499 battle against the Philistine-hardy of body and resolute at heart: THE DAY OF THE LORD. "The Day of the Lord is at hand, at hand! "Gather you, gather you, angels of God- "Who would sit down and sigh for a lost age True hearts will leap up at the trumpet of God, In the Day of the Lord at hand." There is of course, and admittedly, a very which contemporary political subjects are obvious distinction between the way in treated by Mr. Kingsley, and in which the Laureate, for instance, treats them. Both poets show indeed an intense sympathy with the time; but Mr. Kingsley is the combatant, the partisan. There is therefore heat, temper, fierce likings and dislikings, in his rhymes. The Laureate, the drifting sea-foam of the storm. In his on the other hand, is serene and impar tial. He crystallizes and renders shapely amber the fluttering insect is staid and petrified. Our sayings and doings have acquired an historic air when they reappear in his poetry-"suffered a sea-change, he has said about us are the things, we into something rich and strange." What to be said about us for a good many genemay be pretty sure, which will continue rations to come. Still, we can afford to like both men-Hofer, who fights while he sings; Goethe, who sits apart on his Olympus. And this difference of circumstance must be taken into account before we can fairly estimate our author's poetical claims. "These poems of Mr. Kingsley," said an acute but evasive critic to us the other day, after the manner of his craft, are very good; but not good enough." | the greatest poets-Burns, Keats, TennyThis is probably what many readers have son. The Sands of Dee-with the added felt. They expected more; and they are charms of music and girlish voices-our disappointed. "They are good; but they readers have, no doubt, often heard; but are not good enough." But it must be Airly Beacon and The Night Bird will remembered that the making of poems, probably be new to some of them; and so to speak, has not formed the serious we quote these pieces the more readily business of Mr. Kingsley's life, as it has of because they illustrate another noticeable the Laureate's. These snatches of music quality of the lyric-its suggestiveness. are evidently the interludes in a more en- It is the feeling and not the environment grossing drama, "short swallow-flights of (which ought to be subordinated and used song." A thought has risen up occasion- only in so far as really necessary to give ally during reading or work that required body and concreteness to the feeling) expression, and it fitted itself naturally which forms the supreme interest of the into melodious words. Such we take to lyrist; and there is consequently much be the explanation of the contents of this more opportunity for implication, and book; excepting, indeed, the Andromeda, delicate and subdued handling in his than of which a word presently; and such a in any other form of poetry. book must be judged by a very different standard from one which is avowedly the fruition and crown of a life-long devotion to the craft. That Mr. Kingsley lacks genuine poetic insight, is another averment to which it is difficult to reply. What is this subtle and delicate Ariel which men call the spirit of Poetry? No two of the critics are agreed. It is, and will be forever, a question exclusively of feeling, sentiment, individual or national caprice. Whether Mr. Kingsley be a poet in this sense must therefore be left to the determination of each particular reader. But we think most readers of taste will agree with us when we say that these songs and ballads display great force and felicity of expression, much clever and vivid appreciation of natural beauty; that they are distinguished by remarkable breadth, and an almost primitive literalness and simplicity of handling; that the imitative or sympathetic faculty, which metaphysicians have shown to be intimately allied with the imaginative, is strongly developed; and that the close texture and rare compression of the style afford a most effective and much-needed protest against the looseness and lawlessness of recent poetic practice. If he be not a poet, the man who possesses all these qualifications must have at least a very fine instinct for what poetry should be. And whatever criticism may urge to the contrary, Mr. Kingsley, we are convinced, is a true lyric poet. Though the lyric feeling in this volume is more conspicuous, perhaps, than the power of lyric expression, yet one or two of the songs are characterized by a perfection and completeness of form which is not found except in "AIRLY BEACON. "Airly Beacon, Airly Beacon; Oh! the pleasant sight to see Oh! the happy hours we lay Oh! the weary haunt for me, 66 THE NIGHT BIRD. "A floating, a floating "Oh! came you off the isles of Greece, Which fringe the western main?' "I came not off the old world Nor yet from off the new- Which sing the whole night through.' "The current sweeps the old world, The current sweeps the new; The man who can write a song should be able to write a ballad also; for to pro duce a really excellent old ballad, infers a good deal of the same sort of power; and many of Mr. Kingsley's are very charming. It is in these that we note more particularly the simplicity and breadth of handling to which we have referred; that union of the homely and the picturesque which is found in the poetry of primitive peoples, and which so few modern poets have been able to compass. The Longbeard's Saga, in this respect, is probably the most characteristic; but The Weird Lady-an early production-is even more to our liking. THE WEIRD LADY. "The swevens came up round Harold the Earl, "Thy steed is dead in his stall, Earl Harold, 66 That was so fair and free.' Mary Mother she stooped heaven; "Earl Harold came to a house of nuns, And he heard the dead-bell toll; "The nuns they came from the convent-gate They sang for the soul of a lady bright "He staid the corpse beside the grave; 'A sign, a sign!' quod he, By the woman who so loved me.' But after all there is no surer test of the excellence of a song or a ballad than its capacity to affect all kinds and conditions of men; and, as our fishing ally of the morning, Tom Morrice, is just now passing with his well-filled creel slung across his back, we may try the experiment at once. Tom is a keen fisher, and used, consule Planco, to be a considerable She wakened Earl Harold out of his sweven, bit of a poacher; not the moody, savage, To don his harness on; And over the land and over the sea "Oh! but his beard was white with eld, Oh! but his hair was gray; "Earl Harold came to his castle-wall; and murderous miscreant who sends a double charge of slugs into the poor wretch who watches My Lord's pheasants, without a touch of compunction, but the genuine Scotch poacher, who enjoys the danger and romance of his calling, and feels no grudge against either game-preserver or game-keeper, considering the sport a fair trial of skill between himself and the laird, a species of knightly encounter of arms, over which the pale-faced moon sits arbitress. "What think you of this, Tom?" and we read him แ THE THREE FISHERS. "Three fishers went sailing away to the West, Each thought on the woman who loved him the best, "Three wives sat up in the lighthouse tower, And they trimmed the lamps as the sun went down ; But men must work, and women must weep, "Three corpses lay out on the shining sands In the morning gleam as the tide went down, "It has a gran soun," says Tom, repeating it to himself. "I've seen't aften on the sea aboot the fa"." Thank you, Tom; we thought you would like it; and the Rector of Eversley may rest satisfied that he has written one genuine poem. one of the common-places of history. "The influence of the sea on English lit: erature," would form a tolerably attractive subject for discourse at a literary institute in these days, when almost every literary topic of interest has been written out and exhausted, and the literary man, like the hand-loom weaver and the kelp-burner, begins to despair of his craft. And this poem of "Andromeda ”—of which it remains to speak-is essentially a "sea-story." It is a clear and vivid picture of the sea at dawn, at noon-tide, and at night. As a piece of rich and su perb coloring-and this was probably the principal object aimed at in the selection Tintoret or Titian might have mixed the colors; and its warm and voluptuously idealized enjoyment of the powers of life and nature would not have unbefitted the painters of the "Venus" and the "Europa," and is eminently characteristic of the refined sensuousness of the Greek intellect. It needs not to sift more curiously the merits of a poem borrowed from such a source; if it is graceful, sunny, and richly toned, more can not be competently asked. But listen to a page or two of these obnoxious English hexameters ere we put the book away. But, indeed, Mr. Kingsley is always great on the sea-shore, and few men have said better or truer things about it-at-it is eminently happy and successful; least since the grand old ballad of Sir Patrick Spens was written. "The sea," according to a certain dark-eyed critic, "is the poetic side of Mr. Kingsley's mind." Just and true; as that goldentongued criticism always is; but, indeed, of how many English and Scotch men is the sea not the poetic side? We used to fancy that we could detect the "monotonous undertone" in ever so much of our literature-as we could, surely and sensibly, in the habit of thought, nay sometimes in the cadenced speech, of those who had lived much within sight and hearing of its surge. But it was not till we saw Venice-till we learned how that constant companionship had forced itself upon the brick and marble of a great city, on the art and architecture of a conquering people-it was not till then we were assured that our vague suspicion was only 66 It is evening, and Andromeda, "a snowwhite cross on the dark green walls of the sea-cliff," has been left, by her mother and the priests, as a sacrifice to the angry sea-gods: Watching the pulse of the oars die down, as her own died with them, As she passionately reproaches the sea, which she had loved from girlhood, |