Or this description of Deirdre :

Tall as a rush is she,

Sweet as the glitter of the netted lakes!

It does not seem to me that Mr. Trench's vocabulary is always very happily attuned to his theme. He Latinises, and even Hellenises, too freely. It is hard to imagine King Connachar sneering at Naois as a "paragon," or an Irish chanter of the sixth century chanting of "diaphaneity." Such words as "argentine," "imperishable," "arrogant," "attempered," and "cirque" seem to me of questionable propriety in such a poem ; nor can I imagine Deirdre asking the grey seer Cathva if he be "numbered with things terrene." Finally, I would beg Mr. Trench to be on his guard against the fashion of the day which makes for harsh, halting and anomalous metres. His verse is generally harmonious enough; but here and there, even in the smoother utterances of Fintan and Urmael, one is pulled up by a decidedly craggy line.

The little sheaf of occasional poems at the end of Mr. Trench's book includes many delicate and original things. In the Ode on a Silver Birch, in The Nutter, and in one or two other pieces, there is a certain suggestion of Matthew Arnold; but the resemblance arises from spiritual sympathy, not from verbal imitation. The chief technical defect in Mr. Trench's work is an occasional lack of perspicuity. His meaning is generally clear enough, but he does not always succeed in presenting it with perfect purity of outline. The following fine poem, for example, would be finer but for a certain blurring of the contours of its thought. The first stanza especially does not seem to express quite accurately what the poet means; and the imagery of the second and third, though it cannot be called incongruous, lacks something of that perfect visual consistency which betokens. perfect mastery.

SHAKESPEARE.

If many a daring spirit must discover

The chartless world, why should they glory lack?
Because athwart the skyline they sank over
Few, few, the shipmen be that have come back.

Yet one, wreck'd oft, hath by a giddy cord

The rugged head of Destiny regain'd—

One from the maelstrom's lap hath swum aboard-
One from the polar sleep himself unchain'd.

But he, acquainted well with every tone

Of madness whining in his shroudage slender,
From storm and mutiny emerged alone
Self-righted from the dreadful self-surrender :

Rich from the isles where sojourn long is death
Won back to cool Thames and Elizabeth,
Sea-weary, yes, but human still, and whole-
A circumnavigator of the soul.

From among several deeply felt and finely expressed lyrics, I select the following, not as the best, but as the briefest:

She comes not when Noon is on the roses

Too bright is Day.

She comes not to the Soul till it reposes

From work and play.

But when Night is on the hills, and the great Voices
Roll in from Sea,

By starlight and by candlelight and dreamlight

She comes to me.

The Night and Come, let us make Love deathless are intenser and more elaborate than this, but not more melodious or more truly lyrical.

Mr. Trench's work as a whole, though it certainly cannot be called unripe, strikes one as lingering a little on the hither side of complete maturity. He has all the gifts of a true poet, but he does not always develop them to the best advantage. I trust we may regard this first book as only an earnest of more sustained and perhaps more thoroughly accomplished work to follow.

A CHARGE.

If thou hast squander'd years to grave a gem
Commission'd by thy absent Lord, and while
'Tis incomplete,

Others would bribe thy needy skill to them-
Dismiss them to the street!

Shouldst thou at last discover Beauty's grove,
At last be panting on the fragrant verge,
But in the track,

Drunk with divine possession, thou meet Love-
Turn, at her bidding, back.

When round thy ship in tempest Hell appears,
And every spectre mutters up more dire

To snatch control

And loose to madness thy deep-kennell'd Fears— Then, to the helm, O Soul!

Last; if upon the cold green-mantling sea
Thou cling, alone with Truth, to the last spar,

Both castaway

And one must perish-let it not be he

Whom thou art sworn to obey!

IN THE ROMAN AMPHITHEATRE, VERONA.

Two architects of Italy-austere

Men who could fashion nothing small-refused

To die with life, and for their purpose used

This dim and topless Amphitheatre.

Some Cæsar trench'd the orb of its ellipse
And call'd on distant provinces to swell
Resonant arches whence his World could scan,
Tier above tier, the fighters and the ships.

But Dante-having raised, as dreamer can,
Higher tenfold these walls immutable—
Sole in the night arena, grew aware
He was himself the thing spectacular
Seized by the ever-thirsting gaze of Hell,-
Here, on the empty sand, a banish'd man.

MRS. MARRIOTT-WATSON

Her

MRS. MARRIOTT-WATSON disconcerts and discourages criticism by the absolute correctness of her writing. She is the "Andrea Senz'-Errore of latter-day verse. Limitations she has, no doubt, but positive faults-not one. diction is pure, her rhymes perfect; her metres, without being mechanical, are absolutely correct; her imagery is always restrained, consistent, congruous. To some people, this faultlessness no doubt seems a blemish. Their idea of poetry is thought excruciated and language bedevilled. They love either to browse on intellectual chaff, chopped as dry and sapless as possible, or else to luxuriate in an iridescent lather of verbiage. Such readers may apply to Mrs. Marriott-Watson's work the much-misapplied phrase, 'faultily faultless, splendidly null." I emphatically dissent. In reading her verse, I have the exhilarating sensation of skating over perfectly smooth, strong, and yet elastic ice, where one has not the least fear of catching one's skate in a crack, or sousing into an air-hole. Not that there is anything wintry or chill about her poetry. My metaphor refers simply to its surface texture, not to its temperature.

66

Without metaphor or exaggeration of any sort, Mrs. Marriott-Watson has achieved an astonishing correctness of style and perfection of technique. "Achieved" is perhaps not the right word; this sense of form is a thing