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,
Where my white girlhood's full fleet days were spent,
There the breeze freshens, and a great sun gleams.

Sleeps the old château through the roseate hours,
Drifts the white odorous bloom in almond bowers;
And the long grasses, hot and indolent,
Murmur of April and her wine-rich showers.

Like little white-winged birds that fluttering fly,
Lustrous small clouds come sailing down the sky,
And the great cattle, breathing thymy sweet,
Stand where gold cowslips in the grass are high.
Cherries are ripe and red-lipped in the nets,
And the old pear-tree that its youth forgets,
Hoary with lichen, stands with aged feet
Deep in a purple mist of violets.

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,
The sweet small footsteps of the silvern rain.

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
Through ways as sad as death;
In alien paths their tired feet bled,

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-
Charmed the butter off my churn;

'Tis I would know it the wide world over,
Yellow as saffron, scented as clover.

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;
Yet fairy-spells come not from the Devil;
And Margaret Grady-I fear she will burn-
I do forgive her with hate and scorn.

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,
Voices of children never born,

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

!