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. A wind blew out of the east-sou'-east The "Laughing Sally" sped for her life, The black flag flew at her top to tell 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; She passed the bar by a secret channel She passed the bar, she sped like a ghost, At moonrise up to the river-mouth And while she lay in the run of the seas, On the English ship the twain bore down And the breaker's roar was heard no more In the thunder of the fight. The crash of the broadsides rolled and stormed 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 She hove to under a high French hull, Blood and fire on the streaming decks, And fire and blood below; The heat of hell, and the reek of hell, And when the stars paled out of heaven With one foe beaten under his bow, The other afar in flight, The English captain turned to look The English captain turned, and stared;— 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; 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, |