CXLVI.

Nay! think no more, but grip the slender waist
Of her whose kisses leave no bitter taste,

Reason's a hag, and love a painted jade,-
Come daughter of the vine, dear and disgraced.

CLXXV.

Of all the wise wisest is he who knows

What saith the wine as in the cup it flows,
And he alone is learnèd who can read

The little scented pages of the rose.

Like most of Mr. Le Gallienne's work, these Rubáiyát would be the better for weeding; but why should the weeds blind us to the beauty of the flowers, which shoot up far above them?

A quick and graceful fancy, a passion for beauty in all its manifestations, a straightforward outlook upon life, and a gift of inventing picturesque and melodious phrases—all these qualities Mr. Le Gallienne possesses, and they are undeniably the qualities of a poet. He is not a great stylist, he is not a great metrist. His faculty, indeed, is not one which imperiously calls for verse as its only adequate medium of expression. Neither his culture nor (perhaps) his character fits him for the very highest flights. But he has said some things finely, and many things beautifully; and the power to do this, and do it in verse, seems to me the one true criterion of the poet's calling.

Yet Time-'tis the strangest thing of all— Knoweth not the sense of the words he saith; Eternity taught him his parrot-call

Of "Love and Death."

Year after year doth the old man climb
The mountainous knees of Eternity,
But Eternity telleth nothing to Time-
It may not be.

ON MR. GLADSTONE'S RETIREMENT.

The world grows Lilliput, the great men go;
If greatness be, it wears no outer sign;

No more the signet of the mighty line
Stamps the great brow for all the world to know.
Shrunken the mould of manhood is, and lo!

Fragments and fractions of the old divine,
Men pert of brain, planned on a mean design,
Dapper and undistinguished-such we grow.

No more the leonine heroic head,

The ruling arm, great heart, and kingly eye;

No more th' alchemic tongue that turned poor themes

Of statecraft into golden-glowing dreams;

No more a man for man to deify:

Laurel no more-the heroic age is dead.

MRS. MEYNELL

STERN veracity, I fear, enforces the admission that few poetesses of the past have shown a very highly developed faculty for strict poetical form. I am not aware that the works of any woman in any modern language are reckoned among the consummate models of metrical style. In England, at any rate, we have had no female Milton, Coleridge, or Swinburne. Great poetesses though they were, beyond a doubt, Mrs. Browning and Miss Rossetti were incurious of formal perfection, especially in rhyme; and ladies as a rule seem to have aimed at a certain careless grace rather than a strenuous complexity or accuracy of metrical structure.

In respect of accuracy, though not of complexity, Mrs. Meynell is one of the rare exceptions to this rule. Within a carefully limited range, her form is unimpeachable. Her grace is often exquisite, but never careless. She never strays beyond two or three simple iambic or trochaic measures, and her most elaborate stanza (the sonnet excepted) is one of five lines, with rhyme-scheme either a abba or a baba. Dactylic and anapæstic rhythms and intricate rhyme-patterns she altogether eschews. The sonnet in its strictest form she writes with real accomplishment; but the sonnet is really a very easy mould to fill. This, I think, is rather a commonplace than a paradox. Who is there, in