which we take the following wretchedly poor, far fetched and obscure figure: "Love came upon us suddenly And loosed-an idle hour to kill- A headless, armless armory That smote us both on Jakko Hill." Now, an "armless armory" may mean an armory which at present contains no firearms; but that an armory ever had a head to lose is not generally known. Besides, how can a headless, armless armory smite any one? A figure of speech should have at least a remote application. Neither is "clean departed" very elegant speech in which to address a princess: "Princess, behold your ancient state has clean departed." But we have its companion figure in "The Plea of the Simla Dancers" in the following: "To-night the moon that watched our lightsome wilesThat beamed upon us through the deodars Is wan with gazing on official files, And desecrating desks disgust the stars." In personifying inanimate objects we may, with perfect propriety, ascribe to them some of the appetites, traits and emotions of persons, but not all. Many things may disgust individuals; but to say "desecrating desks disgust the stars," is no more appropriate figure than to speak of desecrating stars disgusting the desks. Either is an almost meaningless metaphor, and as far from good taste as the Dog-star Sirius is from Simla or Jakko Hill. But a plea of forty-eight lines and a prologue is not without other figures of equal taste: "And all the long verandas, eloquent Again, the dancers having lost their hall, "cried against the crime of it," "Give-ere dancing cease and hearts are broken- Now, we can conceive of dancers being ravished with the delight of their pastime, but to say that the ball-room itself was ravished is to rival Orpheus himself in imparting to inanimate nature the charms of music and the delights of the light fantastic. But "babbling kisses, laughter, love, and tears" would certainly make an excellent plague of "unbidden sentiment." We can see how a kiss may be appropriately styled "a humid seal of soft affection," as Burns expressed it; we see tenderness in "The test of affection's a tear," or "The sweetest memorial's the first kiss of love," as Byron's muse inspires him to express so beautifully; but the babbling kind of kisses, of love, and of tears probably no one, not even a poet, ever experienced, unless, perchance, the one who met Supi-yaw-let: 66 "'Er petticut was yallar, an' 'er little cap was green, An' 'er name was Supi-yaw-lat-jes' the same as Thee baw's Queen, An' I seed her fust a-smokin' of a whackin' cheroot, Wot they called the Great Gaud Budd Plucky lot she cared for idols when I kissed 'er where she stud! On the road to Mandalay." We next have seventeen stanzas of the "Ballad of Fisher's Boarding House." We presume such poems, to use the language of Macaulay, "rank as high among the delicacies of intellectual epicures as the Strasburg pies among the dishes described in the Almanac des Gourmands." Around "a fistbanged board" sat "men of all the ports, from Mississip to Clyde." "They told their tales of wreck and wrong, They backed their toughest statements with "Now Anne of Austria shared their drinks," who came "to eat the bread of infamy and take the wage of shame." A row soon ensues in which "slew they Hans the blue-eyed Dane." While the language of the ballad is not so vile as that of many others, yet the ballad itself is fit for lowest dives only. If such stuff prove a source of wealth and popularity to its author, may we not look for a swarm of such writers bidding for fame and riches? We do not know what Mr. Richardson may think of many of Kipling's verses, but he says "the mildly disgusting passages" found in Jo Barlow's "Hasty Pudding," a mock-heroic, written more than three generations ago, "give more offense to the readers of our fastidious age than they did to our tough-brained great-grandfathers." Either, then, Mr. Kipling or Mr. Richardson is evidently mistaken as to the real taste of "the readers of our fastidious age," and we are certainly hopeful that it is Mr. Kipling that is in error. Ruskin says: "There is a curious feeling, almost innate in men, that though they are bound to speak the truth, in speaking to a single person, they may lie as much as they please, provided they lie to two or more people at once." This theory seems even more applicable as a poetic license, so far as writing on dirty themes and in a disgusting style is concerned. We think, however, few indeed are the American newspapers which would have admitted to their columns very many of Kipling's verses had they been presented to them for first publication even by the author himself. "Certain Maxims of Hafiz", "picked up from the worm-holes of long vanished days," contains passages which show that a low taste predominated in the poet's mind in his selection and recast of them; for example: As the thriftless gold of the babul, so is the gold that we spend On a Derby Sweep, or our neighbor's wife, or the horse that we buy from a friend. "What the People Said" is designed to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of Victoria's reign. This is a most unworthy production. What a poem for the occasion! The fatalistic teachings of a sepoy plowman in five stanzas to celebrate fifty years of the most glorious reign in English history! It may be objected that Kipling was only twenty-two. Numerous instances of persons having won real fame at this age may be set off against this objection. "The Undertaker's Horse," which runs thus: "It may be you wait your time, Beast Quit the sunlight, cut the rhyming, drop the glass, Where some dusky heathen smothers Us with marigolds in lieu of English grass," and is, in a sense, a view of death, if taken seriously, does not at all compare favorably with "O, Why Should the Spirit of Mortal be Proud?" or |