My birds, come back! the hollow sky

Is weary for your note.

(Sweet throat, come back! O liquid mellow throat!)

Ere May's soft minions hereward fly,

Shame on ye, laggards, to deny

The brooding breast, the sun-bright eye,

The tawny shining coat.

If the refrain (for I know not how else to describe the parenthetic third line of each stanza) is of Miss Brown's own invention, she cannot be too warmly congratulated. But be this as it may, the song is an inspiration that ought to take its place in every "Golden Treasury" of English lyrics.

LETHE.

You hope we shall remember, dear,
The happy days when we lived here?
Ah, child, what shouldst thou know of fear,
Whose soul is like a rosy leaf

Floating adown the stream of grief,
The velvet edge incurved, a boat
Unwet with woe, and made to float
Forgetful of the flood beneath,
Whose oozy waters smell of death!
Turn here thy gaze, and look on her,
Thy grandame, who wots not to stir
From her dull corner; note her face
With wrinkles lined; seek out the grace
That once adorned her heyday bloom,
Rusted and worthless in that tomb.
And think you she would greatly care,
If God should make her smooth and fair,
And round and rosy, eyes alight
With youthful pride and longing bright,
To keep that record of the years,

And trace those channels made by tears?
Saying: "In this I wept my son;
This came when old distrust begun;
That line was cut, O cruel spite!

When sweets of loving took their flight."

Nay, then, I think she'd find it good

To stand up in the lustihood

Of youthful grace and new-sprung pride,
And throw her worn-out flesh aside.

And so shall we, if in the day

When sins and ails are purged away,

The cunning record of the brain,

The hates and madness, grief and pain,

The murderous deed we did our friend,
The scoff for which there's no amend
May die a natural death, and we
Again like little children be;
And caring not to understand
Our birth into that other land,

Roam through its valleys, hand in hand.

BLISS CARMAN

A FASCINATING and somewhat baffling talent is that of Mr. Bliss Carman. His weird and fantastic imagination is enlisted in the service of a far-reaching philosophy which purports to gather the whole universe into its embrace; but the precise nature of that philosophy I cannot for the life of me discover. A half-stoical, half-rollicking Bohemianism is one of its prevailing notes; yet every now and then it passes over, without the slightest modulation, into a sort of grim and cynical pessimism; while in a number of poems one is tempted to call it sheer rigmarole, a long-drawn pageant of symbols which symbolise nothing. I feel that here I am on dangerous ground. It is quite possible that there may arise -if it has not already arisen-a sect of Carmanites who, by brooding on the enigmas of Behind the Arras, may hatch out a religion from the germs of thought which are scattered through its pages in reckless profusion. Militant sects have been founded ere now on less cryptic, and certainly less thoughtful, scriptures. I myself, were casting about for a religion, should be tempted to shut myself up for six weeks or so in a lonely tower, with no literature in my portmanteau but Behind the Arras and Low Tide on Grand Pré. One might easily find much duller and less melodious sacred books. But as I feel no pressing need for a new revelation, I am bound to say, at the risk of figuring as an incredible dullard in the eyes of a Carmanite posterity,