Reviews Part 26

Day by day along the Orient faintly glows the tender dawn, Day by day the pearly dewdrops tremble on the upland lawn:

Day by day the star of morning pales before the coming ray, And the first faint streak of radiance brightens to the perfect day.

Day by day the rosebud gathers to itself, from earth and sky, Fragrant stores and ampler beauty, lovelier form and deeper dye:

Day by day a richer crimson mantles in its glowing breast-- Every golden hour conferring some sweet grace that crowns the rest.

And thou canst not tell the moment when the day ascends her throne, When the morning star hath vanished, and the rose is fully blown.

So each day fulfils its purpose, calm, unresting, strong, and sure, Moving onward to completion, doth the work of G.o.d endure.

How unlike man's toil and hurry! how unlike the noise, the strife, All the pain of incompleteness, all the weariness of life!

Ye look upward and take courage. He who leads the golden hours, Feeds the birds, and clothes the lily, made these human hearts of ours:

Knows their need, and will supply it, manna falling day by day, Bread from heaven, and food of angels, all along the desert way.

The Secretary of the International Technical College at Bedford has issued a most interesting prospectus of the aims and objects of the Inst.i.tution. The College seems to be intended chiefly for ladies who have completed their ordinary course of English studies, and it will be divided into two departments, Educational and Industrial. In the latter, cla.s.ses will be held for various decorative and technical arts, and for wood-carving, etching, and photography, as well as sick-nursing, dressmaking, cookery, physiology, poultry-rearing, and the cultivation of flowers. The curriculum certainly embraces a wonderful amount of subjects, and I have no doubt that the College will supply a real want.

The Ladies' Employment Society has been so successful that it has moved to new premises in Park Street, Grosvenor Square, where there are some very pretty and useful things for sale. The children's smocks are quite charming, and seem very inexpensive. The subscription to the Society is one guinea a year, and a commission of five per cent. is charged on each thing sold.

Miss May Morris, whose exquisite needle-work is well known, has just completed a pair of curtains for a house in Boston. They are amongst the most perfect specimens of modern embroidery that I have seen, and are from Miss Morris's own design. I am glad to hear that Miss Morris has determined to give lessons in embroidery. She has a thorough knowledge of the art, her sense of beauty is as rare as it is refined, and her power of design is quite remarkable.

Mrs. Jopling's life-cla.s.ses for ladies have been such a success that a similar cla.s.s has been started in Chelsea by Mr. Clegg Wilkinson at the Carlyle Studios, King's Road. Mr. Wilkinson (who is a very brilliant young painter) is strongly of opinion that life should be studied from life itself, and not from that abstract presentation of life which we find in Greek marbles--a position which I have always held very strongly myself.

(1) Memoirs of an Arabian Princess. By the Princess Emily Ruete of Oman and Zanzibar. (Ward and Downey.)

(2) Makers of Venice. By Mrs. Oliphant. (Macmillan and Co.)

(3) The Plan of Campaign. By Mabel Robinson. (Vizetelly and Co.)

(4) A Year in Eden. By Harriet Waters Preston. (Fisher Unwin.)

(5) The Englishwoman's Year-Book, 1888. (Hatchards.)

(6) Rachel and Other Poems. (Cornish Brothers.)

THE POETS' CORNER--VI

(Pall Mall Gazette, April 6, 1888.)

David Westren, by Mr. Alfred Hayes, is a long narrative poem in Tennysonian blank verse, a sort of serious novel set to music. It is somewhat lacking in actuality, and the picturesque style in which it is written rather contributes to this effect, lending the story beauty but robbing it of truth. Still, it is not without power, and cultured verse is certainly a pleasanter medium for story-telling than coa.r.s.e and common prose. The hero of the poem is a young clergyman of the muscular Christian school:

A lover of good cheer; a bubbling source Of jest and tale; a monarch of the gun; A dreader tyrant of the darting trout Than that bright bird whose azure lightning threads The brooklet's bowery windings; the red fox Did well to seek the boulder-strewn hill-side, When Westren cheered her dappled foes; the otter Had cause to rue the dawn when Westren's form Loomed through the streaming bracken, to waylay Her late return from plunder, the rough pack Barking a jealous welcome round their friend.

One day he meets on the river a lovely girl who is angling, and helps her to land

A gallant fish, all flas.h.i.+ng in the sun In silver mail inlaid with scarlet gems, His back thick-sprinkled as a leopard's hide With rich brown spots, and belly of bright gold.

They naturally fall in love with each other and marry, and for many years David Westren leads a perfectly happy life. Suddenly calamity comes upon him, his wife and children die and he finds himself alone and desolate.

Then begins his struggle. Like Job, he cries out against the injustice of things, and his own personal sorrow makes him realise the sorrow and misery of the world. But the answer that satisfied Job does not satisfy him. He finds no comfort in contemplating Leviathan:

As if we lacked reminding of brute force, As if we never felt the clumsy hoof, As if the bulk of twenty million whales Were worth one pleading soul, or all the laws That rule the lifeless suns could soothe the sense Of outrage in a loving human heart!

Sublime? majestic? Ay, but when our trust Totters, and faith is shattered to the base, Grand words will not uprear it.

Mr. Hayes states the problem of life extremely well, but his solution is sadly inadequate both from a psychological and from a dramatic point of view. David Westren ultimately becomes a mild Unitarian, a sort of pastoral Stopford Brooke with leanings towards Positivism, and we leave him preaching plat.i.tudes to a village congregation. However, in spite of this commonplace conclusion there is a great deal in Mr. Hayes's poem that is strong and fine, and he undoubtedly possesses a fair ear for music and a remarkable faculty of poetical expression. Some of his descriptive touches of nature, such as

In meeting woods, whereon a film of mist Slept like the bloom upon the purple grape,

are very graceful and suggestive, and he will probably make his mark in literature.

There is much that is fascinating in Mr. Rennell Rodd's last volume, The Unknown Madonna and Other Poems. Mr. Rodd looks at life with all the charming optimism of a young man, though he is quite conscious of the fact that a stray note of melancholy, here and there, has an artistic as well as a popular value; he has a keen sense of the pleasurableness of colour, and his verse is distinguished by a certain refinement and purity of outline; though not pa.s.sionate he can play very prettily with the words of pa.s.sion, and his emotions are quite healthy and quite harmless.

In Excelsis, the most ambitious poem in the book, is somewhat too abstract and metaphysical, and such lines as

Lift thee o'er thy 'here' and 'now,'

Look beyond thine 'I' and 'thou,'

are excessively tedious. But when Mr. Rodd leaves the problem of the Unconditioned to take care of itself, and makes no attempt to solve the mysteries of the Ego and the non-Ego, he is very pleasant reading indeed.

A Mazurka of Chopin is charming, in spite of the awkwardness of the fifth line, and so are the verses on a.s.sisi, and those on San Servolo at Venice. These last have all the brilliancy of a clever pastel. The prettiest thing in the whole volume is this little lyric on Spring:

Such blue of sky, so palely fair, Such glow of earth, such lucid air!

Such purple on the mountain lines, Such deep new verdure in the pines!

The live light strikes the broken towers, The crocus bulbs burst into flowers, The sap strikes up the black vine stock, And the lizard wakes in the splintered rock, And the wheat's young green peeps through the sod, And the heart is touched with a thought of G.o.d; The very silence seems to sing, It must be Spring, it must be Spring!

We do not care for 'palely fair' in the first line, and the repet.i.tion of the word 'strikes' is not very felicitous, but the grace of movement and delicacy of touch are pleasing.

The Wind, by Mr. James Ross, is a rather gusty ode, written apparently without any definite scheme of metre, and not very impressive as it lacks both the strength of the blizzard and the sweetness of Zephyr. Here is the opening:

The roaming, tentless wind No rest can ever find-- From east, and west, and south, and north He is for ever driven forth!

From the chill east Where fierce hyaenas seek their awful feast: From the warm west, By beams of glitt'ring summer blest.

Nothing could be much worse than this, and if the line 'Where fierce hyaenas seek their awful feast' is intended to frighten us, it entirely misses its effect. The ode is followed by some sonnets which are destined, we fear, to be ludibria ventis. Immortality, even in the nineteenth century, is not granted to those who rhyme 'awe' and 'war'

together.

Mr. Isaac Sharp's Saul of Tarsus is an interesting, and, in some respects, a fine poem.

Saul of Tarsus, silently, With a silent company, To Damascus' gates drew nigh.