occur stanzas which clearly prophesy the nature-singer of after years. It is Louise de la Vallière who is speaking: And it may be my feet will go in dreams Down by Touraine's fair fields and pleasant streams, Sleeps the old château through the roseate hours, Like little white-winged birds that fluttering fly, This is a clearly-seen, keenly-felt picture, very noteworthy in the work of a beginner. Several other poems in the same book contain characteristic foretastes of Mrs. Hinkson's later manner; for instance, these lines from An Answer: I yearned . . . To hear again, 'mid leafy springtide ways, In the main, however, the individuality of the poetess is as yet but dubiously revealed. She is much taken up with romantic and devotional themes, and draws her inspiration largely from the pre-Raphaelite poets; for example, in My Lady, Joan of Arc and King Cophetua's Queen. She has two delightful sonnets on Fra Angelico at Fiesole; but to my sense, the most living things in the book are the poems of Irish patriotism, Waiting, which describes Fionn and his warriors biding his time, like Barbarossa, in a cavern of the Donegal hills, and The Flight of the Wild Geese, dealing with the homeward yearnings of the Irish Jacobites, who, after the Treaty of Limerick, took service in foreign lands: In Austria and France they roved The laurel crowns that decked the head Were thorn-set underneath. There is nothing shrill in Mrs. Hinkson's patriotism. It is very intimate and touching. Her second book, Shamrocks (1887), opens with a longish narrative poem, The Pursuit of Diarmuid and Grainne, which contains some charming details, but will scarcely rank, as a whole, among the master-works of the Keltic Renascence. Nor, I think, does The Fate of King Feargus show the true narrative gift. On the other hand, The Dead Mother strikes that note of intense maternal feeling which had been anticipated, indeed, by a few of the greatest male poets, and by certain nameless ballad-singers, but which has naturally entered much more largely into literature since women learned, not merely to write more or less like men, but to make their sex articulate. The Sick Princess and After Harvest are beautiful, each in its kind; Noel is a sort of preliminary study for the much finer Singing Stars of a later volume; and The King's Cupbearer is a very noble and impressive patriotic poem. In the Ballads and Lyrics of 1891, Mrs. Hinkson's individuality is much more clearly developed. Here her main topic is what I venture to call Christian folk-lore, treated with the utmost reverence, but, for the most part, in a decorative Keltic key. She has several poems on the legend of St. Francis, and others entitled Our Lady's Exile, The Hiding-away of Blessed Angus, All Souls' Night, Michael the Archangel, Golden Lilies, and The Chapel of the Grail. They all contain beautiful work, but there is a touch of artifice in their simplicity which renders them less sympathetic to me than those pieces, such as The Fairy Foster-Mother and The Witch, in which Mrs. Hinkson treats pagan folk-lore from the point of view, not of the abstract primitive Christian, but of the concrete Irish peasant. In The Witch, for instance, there is a delightful touch of character. It opens with the following verse: Margaret Grady-I fear she will burn- 'Tis I would know it the wide world over, The speaker has recourse to a "fairy-man," who gives her a witch-hazel wreath, by means of which the sinister arts of Margaret Grady are brought to nothing. Then the speaker closes the episode as follows: I bless the fairy-man though he be evil; How racy is the human nature of the last line! And this poem strikes the keynote for several other admirable sketches of peasant character and feeling in Mrs. Hinkson's later books. In this collection, too, she has more than one of those poems of profoundly feminine emotion above alluded to. Here is the last stanza of a short piece which is simply entitled A Woman: And for that music most forlorn, And the love words that are not hers, Even the sweet sky-choristers Pleasure her not. Ah, let her be, She and her dreams are company. The following poem I quote partly for its matter, partly for its measure. Mrs. Hinkson has several times used ! |