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! Behind your blushing banners in the sky, With silence sandalled, so they weave their way, O changeless guardians! O ye wizard firs! What breath may move ye, or what breeze invite To odorous hot lendings of the heart? 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; I was alive, but not to her, And all her soul lay dead to me. Ah, but the end is yet to read! 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, 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!) 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, |