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contributions of Greater Britain to the flora and fauna of English poetry, Mr. Roberts's writings will be found to merit very close examination. And I have little doubt that they will stand the test of expert criticism. He always gives one the impression of writing with his eye upon the fact-nay, with all his senses alertly percipient of every "vagrant influence" of the spring morning or the summer noon. I know few poets who transfer to their pages so much of the actual colour and aroma of coppice and meadowland as does Mr. Charles Roberts.

THE "LAUGHING SALLY."

A wind blew up from Pernambuco.
(Yeo heave ho! the "Laughing Sally "'!
Hi yeo, heave away!)

A wind blew out of the east-sou'-east
And boomed at the break of day.

The "Laughing Sally" sped for her life,
And a speedy craft was she.

The black flag flew at her top to tell
How she took toll of the sea.

The wind blew up from Pernambuco;

And in the breast of the blast

Came the King's black ship, like a hound let slip On the trail of the "Sally" at last.

For a day and a night, a night and a day;

Over the blue, blue round,

Went on the chase of the pirate quarry,

The hunt of the tireless hound.

"Land on the port bow!" came the cry;
And the "Sally" raced for shore,
Till she reached the bar at the river-mouth
Where the shallow breakers roar.

She passed the bar by a secret channel
With clear tide under her keel,-
For he knew the shoals like an open book,
The captain at the wheel.

She passed the bar, she sped like a ghost,
Till her sails were hid from view
By the tall, liana'd, unsunned boughs
O'erbrooding the dark bayou.

At moonrise up to the river-mouth
Came the King's black ship of war.
The red cross flapped in wrath at her peak,
But she could not cross the bar.

And while she lay in the run of the seas,
By the grimmest whim of chance
Out of a bay to the north came forth
Two battleships of France.

On the English ship the twain bore down
Like wolves that range by night;

And the breaker's roar was heard no more

In the thunder of the fight.

The crash of the broadsides rolled and stormed
To the " Sally," hid from view
Under the tall, liana'd boughs

Of the moonless, dark bayou.

A boat ran out for news of the fight,

And this was the word she brought"The King's ship fights the ships of France As the King's ships all have fought!''

Then muttered the mate," I'm a man of Devon!" And the captain thundered then

"There's English rope that bides for our necks, But we all be English men!"

The "Sally" glided out of the gloom
And down the moon-white river.
She stole like a gray shark over the bar
Where the long surf seethes forever.

She hove to under a high French hull,
And the red cross rose to her peak.
The French were looking for fight that night,
And they hadn't far to seek.

Blood and fire on the streaming decks,

And fire and blood below;

The heat of hell, and the reek of hell,
And the dead men laid a-row !

And when the stars paled out of heaven
And the red dawn-rays uprushed,
The oaths of battle, the crash of timbers,
The roar of the guns were hushed.

With one foe beaten under his bow,

The other afar in flight,

The English captain turned to look
For his fellow in the fight.

The English captain turned, and stared;—
For where the "Sally" had been
Was a single spar upthrust from the sea
With the red-cross flag serene!

A wind blew up from Pernambuco,—

(Yeo heave ho! the "Laughing Sally!"

Hi yeo, heavy away!)

And boomed for the doom of the "Laughing Sally,” Gone down at the break of day.

GEORGE SANTAYANA

His name, and two lines in his Ode to the Mediterranean;
For I was born where first the rills of Tagus
Turn to the westward-

lead one to conclude that Mr. George Santayana is of Spanish parentage. There is nothing in his pure, supple, sedulously refined English to suggest that he is not writing in his native tongue. Yet perhaps the fact that he is not bound by ancestral ties to the land of his sojourn—which I take to be America-may in part account for the extremely abstract quality of his verse. The world has scarcely

any objective existence for him. Though in weaving his similitudes he uses the traditional apparatus of flowers and stars, mountains, rivers and the sea, these things are pure ideas to him, divested of all material attributes. There is scarcely a line of description in his work. A single piece of half a dozen stanzas, entitled Cape Cod, is the exception that proves the rule; and even here the landscape does not merely mirror, but symbolises a mood. The pageantry of life means little or nothing to him. He has no vision for external nature, but only for the summaries, essences, abstracts of phenomena, recorded in the concave of his soul. He comes near to some such confession in the

lines:

There may be chaos still around the world,
The little world that in my thinking lies;

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