MISS ALICE BROWN

So far as I am aware, Miss Alice Brown has written only one little book of poetry, The Road to Castaly. It runs to seventy pages, and contains about half a hundred poems. They are partly poems of nature, partly personal and dramatic lyrics; and in both classes of work there are pieces of real and striking merit. Excellent, to my thinking, is Miss Brown's strong and highly cultivated style. Her English is of the best-copious, unaffected, pure. The first poems of the collection, Wood Longing and Pan, are full of an ecstatic sense of the glory and mystery of nature. Sunrise on Mansfield Mountain lends itself better to quotation, and I copy the opening lines:

O swift forerunners, rosy with the race!
Spirits of dawn, divinely manifest

Behind your blushing banners in the sky,
Daring invaders of Night's tenting-ground,—
How do ye strain on forward-bending foot,
Each to be first in heralding of joy!

With silence sandalled, so they weave their way,
And so they stand, with silence panoplied,
Chanting, through mystic symbollings of flame,
Their solemn invocation to the light.

O changeless guardians! O ye wizard firs!
What strenuous philter feeds your potency,
That thus ye rest, in sweet wood-hardiness,
Ready to learn of all and utter naught?

What breath may move ye, or what breeze invite

To odorous hot lendings of the heart?
What wind-but all the winds are yet afar,
And e'en the little tricksy zephyr sprites,
That fleet before them, like their elfin locks,
Have lagged in sleep, nor stir nor waken yet
To pluck the robe of patient majesty.

How

This is fine verse and fine thought. How admirable are the four lines of the second paragraph! memorable the phrase which speaks of the pine-trees' "odorous hot lendings of the heart," and the image which represents the "tricksy zephyr sprites" as the elf-locks of the great winds! The poem entitled The Return is a spiritual imagining of great strength and beauty. describes the return of a soul to the room where the body lies dead, and where "one in silence sits apart" from the

other mourners.

All night we watched together there;
Strange tryst we kept, my love and I!
My hurrying heart was hot with words
To teach her what it is to die.
Yet, barred within her beauty's cell,
She might not hear, she might not see;

I was alive, but not to her,

And all her soul lay dead to me.

Ah, but the end is yet to read!
When the door opens at her plaint,
When she hath set one forward step,
With bliss fordone, with languor faint,—
Closer than dreams of me have been,
More dear than her immortal breath,
My breast shall be her porch of heaven,
My face her visioning of death.

It

A West-Country Lover is a lyric of admirable movement, while Lethe, quoted at the end of this article, shows exquisite feeling and no small accomplishment. There is variety, too, in Miss Brown's inspiration. Heimgegangen, as its title suggests, is a simple and touching folk-song, on the German model; In Extremis is a

passionate litany, craving deliverance, not from pain or sorrow, but from the "base empery" of fear; and in the following verses, entitled The Slanderer, we have a flash of no less passionate satire :

The angels of the living God,

Marked, from of old, with mystic name,
O'erveil their vision, lest they see
One sinner prostrate in his shame.
And God Himself, the only Great,
Preserves in heaven one holy spot,
Where, swept by purifying flame,
Transgression is remembered not.
Yet thou, O banqueter on worms,
Who wilt not let corruption pass!-
Dost search out mildew, mould and stain,
Beneath a magnifying-glass.

If one lies wounded, there art thou,

To prick him deeper where he bleeds;

Thy brain, a palimpsest of crime,

Thy tongue, the trump of evil deeds.

Nothing that Miss Brown has written is without a certain

touch of originality and distinction.

But the gem of her

book, beyond a doubt, is the little lyric entitled

CANDLEMAS.

O hearken, all ye little weeds

That lie beneath the snow,

(So low, dear hearts, in poverty so low!)
The sun hath risen for royal deeds,
A valiant wind the vanguard leads;
Now quicken ye, lest unborn seeds
Before ye rise and blow.

O furry living things, adream

On winter's drowsy breast,

(How rest ye there, how softly, safely rest!)

Arise and follow where a gleam

Of wizard gold unbinds the stream,
And all the woodland windings seem
With sweet expectance blest.