JOHN B. TABB IN Mr. John B. Tabb we come upon a clear-cut, cameolike poetic individuality. His poetry, so far as it is known to me, is contained in two exceedingly dainty little volumes entitled Poems (1894) and Lyrics (1897). These booklets exactly typify Mr. Tabb's dainty talent. It is in no disparaging sense that I use this phrase. Smallness of scale is the deliberately-adopted characteristic of all Mr. Tabb's work. His lyrics seldom extend beyond three quatrains, and are often compressed into one. In the booklet entitled Poems, for instance, out of 163 numbers, only three overrun a single page, while the great majority fill less than half of one of the diminutive pages. In truth, Mr. Tabb is an epigrammatist rather than a pure lyrist. Even when he writes what is to the eye a song, it is apt to be to the ear and the mind an expanded epigram. His metres are correct and graceful, but they have no lyric impetus-they do not sing. His exquisite measured speech neither makes its own music nor asks to be upborne on the wings of melody. The main sources of his inspiration are three: Nature (and in especial birds and flowers); Devotional sentiment, sincere though fanciful; Personal sentiment, which finds discreet, unimpassioned, one might almost say attenuated, utterance. If one were asked to illustrate the somewhat overworked distinction between fancy and imagination, one need but open at random either of Mr. Tabb's booklets, to find a clear, and very often a striking, example of the former quality. He has none of the harshness, the violences, of the spiritual singers of the seventeenth century; in his limpidity of form, indeed, he is much more reminiscent of the epicurean Herrick; but in his application of a humourless wit to spiritual subjects he denotes himself a true descendant of Crashaw and Herbert. I do not employ the word "humourless" in a reproachful sense, as meaning that he says things whereof humour would have checked the utterance. This is seldom or never the case. My meaning is simply to release the term wit from its conventional but inessential association with merriment, before applying it to the master faculty of Mr. Tabb's sedate and pensive mind. The essence of wit is a quick perception of analogies; but all analogies are not necessarily comic. On the other hand, when we find a poem unmistakably inspired by a purely intellectual concept, we are apt to doubt, not the sincerity or depth, but the immediate poignancy, of the emotion it expresses. That is why I call Mr. Tabb's utterances of personal sentiment attenuated. Perhaps sublimated would be a better word. So much I say by way of delimitation-not certainly of disparagement. Mr. Tabb is a most admirable writer: he has said numberless beautiful things, with an accent all his own. He does not always avoid those pitfalls of the concettist, frigidity and triviality; but even his frigidity is often exquisite. Here are two conceits which are wintry in every sense; but who can deny their beauty? TO THE BABE NIVA. Niva, Child of Innocence, Dust to dust we go: Thou, when Winter wooed thee hence, Wentest snow to snow. Here, from a sequence of Christmas versicles, is a conceit that George Herbert, surely, would not have disowned: OUT OF BOUNDS. A little Boy of heavenly birth, But far from home to-day, Comes down to find His ball, the Earth, That Sin has cast away. O comrades, let us one and all Join in to get Him back His ball! If this be quaint rather than beautiful, the following seems to me exempt from that reproach: EASTER FLOWERS. We are His witnesses; out of the dim, Dank region of Death we have risen with Him. And Spring, the bright Angel, sits smiling thereon. We are His witnesses. See, where we lay The snow that late bound us is folded away; And April, fair Magdalen, weeping anon, Stands flooded with light of the new-risen Sun! Mr. Tabb has many other devotional pieces of a like exquisite quality; but this is specially characteristic in that it blends devotional feeling with that tender worship of the |