ing them out afresh, not merely parroting the old solutions and evasions; and he finds novel and forcible imagery for his thoughts. The poem is, take it all in all, a truly noble piece of philosophic rhetoric, tense with significance, and at many points glowing with imagination. As I turn its pages, there is not one on which some line or sequence does not stand out either as a highly-condensed epigram or a luminous figure. The wonders of modern science are the outcome of

Fierce forces, tortured to betray

Such secrets as a wizard hardly spies

In crystal dream, or dreaming, when he wakes
Derides exulting, saner than his dream.

Humanity protests against the malice that would to the record of his crimes

Add faults

Of ignorance, omission, and the breach

Of laws that are themselves the breach of Law
Divine.

One rather regrets the last epithet. The phrase "Laws that are themselves the breach of Law" is very striking in its nudity. "Ah! but let me be!" Humanity cries in exasperation at the sophistries of Religion:

Let cerement-wreathing darkness wrap me round,
And noiseless flake on flake of feathery night

Compose me to oblivion absolute.

Rest, rest I crave! From wisdom and from war,
From vanity, endeavour, and despair,

False riddles and false oracles. I crave

Rest from the pauseless pulses of the world!

But it cannot be said that Mr. Coutts reserves all his good things for his protagonist. Job's comforter is no less. eloquent than Job himself; witness the following passage placed in the mouth of Religion:

Repine not that effectual Wisdom works
In secret; with innumerable threads

Weaving an intricate pattern, as immense
As that embroidery of the lacing moons
That circle circling planets; by their suns
Drawn around other clusters; implicate
Themselves about some mightier universe;
Ellipse more monstrous looping huger spheres,
More frequent swarms, to all infinitude;
All trailed in pageant, lightly as the down,
Sown on the sowing wind by provident weeds.

Humanity in his next speech demands:

For what am I but Revelation? I,

The child of God, his scholar, and his clerk;

*

Engrossing on my soul, with iron pen,
The comedies and tragedies of God!

Towards the close of the same speech, Humanity bursts forth into this apostrophe:

I know Thee World-wright or I know Thee Nought!

I know Thee World-wright; yet between that hut

Of refuge and thy jasper citadel

That overcrests the pathway of the clouds,

Palace of promulgation of the law

And seat of government o'er all the hills,

Sinai or Calvary, or before or since,

What void envelopment of blinding mist!

What treacheries of snow and ice and storm!

What false ascents, false guides and ominous deaths!

Reverting to a thought expressed in the previous extract. Humanity says, a little further on:

Again:

The soul-face of the World is shattered to words

In the Mind's mirror ;-how vain, with painted shards

To tesselate God's miniature! No Art

Holds the Arch-Artist's portrait; save myself.

I am not undivine, nor God inhuman!

My God is Truth;

Supreme Sincerity,-whatever else!

Who hates the homage of a menial heart;

*

Whom argument of souls against themselves,
Framed for their overhearing tyrant, hurts
More than arraignment of a scurrilous tongue.

Here is the pivot-thought of pessimism very tersely expressed:

Canst thou record a gladness as engrained,

As indivisibly fibred into life,

As torture is?

Here, again, is a very apt and beautiful image, though one finds it with some surprise in the mouth of Humanity; it seems more characteristic of his interlocutor:

If the Whole

By Him was fashioned and is now maintained,—
In just proportion, just relation, fixed,

Must every part cohere, and all consist

Like radiant raiment, seamless-woven throughout,—
The Seventh Day vesture that He loves to wear,—
Which only Mind's cross lenses rend and ravel,
Impervious to completeness; as the prism
Combs into separate locks a tawny tress

Of slender-rifted sunshine.

Pedantry might find in this passage a mixed metaphor, inquiring how a lens should rend and ravel a vesture; but as the "radiant raiment" is conceived from the first as a vesture of light, the idea of the prism does not conflict with, but rather continues, the original metaphor.

I have made no attempt to follow the reasoning of Mr. Coutts's poem. To do so would be either to copy out the whole dialogue, or to re-write the "Argument" which Mr. Coutts himself prefixes to his work. We are not here concerned with the ingenuity or the cogency of his dialectics; my purpose has simply been to show that he touches his Miltonic instrument with dignity and skill and finds for high thoughts appropriate harmonies.

Two of Mr. Coutts's finest sonnets will be found at the end of this article. To the Moon seems to me especially