new light.

Of the opening sequence of lyrics The Alhambra, only the last seems to me quite up to the poet's best mark. It is called

An address To William Watson at Windermere is marked by real dignity, both of thought and expression. In London, says the poet, contrasting his own lot with his friend's

No "rivulets dance," no torrents flow,

No "forests muse " of pine or oak;

We marvel if a floweret blow

Beneath a heaven so smeared with smoke.

And here no joyous impulse moves

The minds of men with random waves,

But up and down these stony grooves
We hurry, like a gang of slaves.

*

A giant, clanking golden chains;

A monster, bound in torments fierce;
Whose strong integument of pains

No shaft of joy is keen to pierce ;

What more than this can poet spy
Beneath our brave pretence and show?

'Tis light to lift, that bravery,

That broidered coverlid of woe!

And yet perchance I do thee wrong;
Perchance, beneath immediate ill,
Thy clearer insight, trained and strong,
May catch a deeper vision still:
Maybe, though greeting Nature's face
In cloud and crag, in lake and glen,
At least her footsteps thou canst trace
Among the meaner ways of men !

But take thou the unfinished thought,
To mould it, in some later lay,
By finer inspiration wrought,

And sing me all fail to say.

Of the half-dozen sonnets in this volume, only one, I think, shows Mr. Coutts at his best. It is inspired by The Arbitration Treaty, January 1897:

"How beautiful the feet of them that bring

Good tidings o'er the mountains, news of peace! "'

So cried the Hebrew prophet, long release

From long captivity previsioning.

And Cyrus came, with healing on his wing

For Israel; but not by Persia, Greece,

Nor Rome, God made the world from war to cease;

No, nor by Christ, nor any Christian King!

But England, watching by her moated main,

Yet tasting in convergent winds the taint

Of slaughter and the tears of those that weep

The tyranny of battle, hears again,

With spiritual ear, the far and faint

Footfall divine, that treads the "untrampled deep."

The expression "moated main" is something of a flaw in this fine sonnet. There is respectable precedent for it, no doubt; but an ounce of logic is worth a hundredweight of precedent. The sonnet in which Mr. Coutts expresses his indignation at the action of the American Senate is also a strong one; but we had better let bygones be bygones.

Many of the lyrics in this volume are original in conception and inventive in metre. The Riddle, for instance,

is a delightfully fanciful and playful piece; Children is graceful and touching; and Ingens Æquor has a powerful swing in it. A new version of the ballad of The Nutbrown Maid is very simple and pretty, and Queen Guenevere's Maying and A Ballad of Cornwall are rhymed with quaint ingenuity. Half lyric, half epigram, the following versicles are very charmingly turned:

PERFUME.

In love's delightful hours

We passed the mignonette,

And plucked the blue-eyed flowers
That bade us Not Forget;

But now the blue-eyed flowers
We pass and we forget;
The scent of those dear hours

Comes back with mignonette.

Since reflection, as I have said, is the chief weapon in Mr. Coutts's armoury, it is not surprising to find that the graver his theme the greater is his success. He has probably not yet given us the full measure of his power in philosophic verse. He has imagination and feeling in plenty; he has vigour and sincerity of thought; and he has often a very noteworthy felicity of phrase. In brief, he is a serious and strenuous craftsman who places a fine and individual faculty at the service of a lofty ideal.

TO THE MOON.

Θέστυλι, ταὶ κύνες ἄμμιν ἀνὰ πτόλιν ὠρύονται
ὁ θεὸς ἐν τριόδοισι·

THEOCRITUS (Idyll II. 35, 36).

Now maddens the slumbering shepherd in thy sheen;
The death-foreboding watch-dog distant bays
Thy look malign; where cross the lonely ways,
The gliding spectres pace their scant demesne !
As men emerge, this summer night serene,

From revel, sedulous to cheat the days,
They shudder at thy cold accusing gaze,
And wish they were not, and had never been !
Warping their faint reluctant waves, thou glarest
On fascinated seas; no fruitful heat,

No happier race in thy bleached bosom thou bearest;
But rangest in sad bondage to the beat
Of Earth's sad heart, and in amazement farest,
Treading thy weary round with frozen feet.

TO A BEAUTIFUL JEWESS.

The faithful Eliezer, at the well,

Saluted thee; smooth Jacob, in the field;
For thee unhappy Abner's fate was sealed,
And stern Ahasuerus owned thy spell;
Before thy Child the Median sages fell,

And shining hosts of heaven his birth revealed
To shepherds; daily art thou now appealed
As Mother of the Lord of heaven and hell!
For thus the great traditions of thy type
Abide. We children of corrupted breed
Snatch short successes in a time unripe;

And if our greedy race charge thine with greed,
Thine learnt it writhing in the Egyptian's gripe,
Ere yet our youngling nation was in seed.

JOHN DAVIDSON

LONG before he had gravitated to London, long before he had made himself a name, Mr. Davidson, in his Scottish wander-years, had written, and even published, five poems in dramatic form, which he afterwards collected in one volume under the title of Plays. The first, An Unhistorical Pastoral, is dated "Glasgow 1877," the last, Scaramouch in Naxos, "Crieff 1888"; so that for eleven years, it would seem, Mr. Davidson gave the best part of his thoughts to dramatic composition. Yet he cannot be said, in all this time, to have invented a single plot, and scarcely to have created a character. He poured forth enough pure poetry to have made him a reputation twice over, but he showed no comprehension of the most rudimentary exigencies of the particular form he had adopted. I do not merely mean that his plays were totally unsuited to the existing stage; that might be more of a reproach to the stage than to them. What I mean is that he had as yet no inkling of the essential nature of drama, but used the form merely as a vehicle for uncontrolled fantasy, lyrism, and rhetoric.

This is not a question of pitting one convention or one technique against another, and arbitrarily declaring this one excellent, that condemnable. It is not bad technique, but no technique that we find in Mr. Davidson's early plays. Technique, in drama, means the prevision of your audience, and nice adjustment of every stroke of your work