"When chilly autumn comes around,
Sweet rose, what will you do?"

Said she, "When autumn breezes blow,
I'll rain my petals down,

And on them little brookside elves

Will sail to Fairy Town."

THE MUSHROOM TENT.

When showers make the woods all wet,
The tiny wood-folk run and get
Beneath a mushroom's sheltering eaves,
And there on beds of violet leaves
They sleep secure till cease of rain

Doth send them out to play again.

The volume of "Poems of Home and Country" by Dr. Samuel Francis Smith has become, by his recent death, a memorial which not only his friends, but posterity, will prize. We do not mean that much of Dr. Smith's verse will long be read for its own sake, but that its hold on men's remembrance will depend on the interest which other generations take in him as the author of the national hymn, "America." Occasional poetry, like after-dinner speeches, does not last. Nevertheless, in scores of pieces, Dr. Smith reveals a nature rich in piety, patriotism, and the virtues which make and keep friendship; and it is idle to criticise now hymns which have been sung all over the Christian world, and which show no signs of losing their popularity.

Were we to sum up Mr. Savage's little volume in one word, that word should be "thoughtful." He loves nature; he meditates; he is a Wordsworthian in the third generation, with a dash of metrical mannerism which shows him to be not uninfluenced by the latest fashion. A Saturday Reviewer would probably derive some fun from such a statement as

"I have stood and dimly hearkened

To the falling of the dew,"

and might undertake to inform Mr. Savage that dew does not fall, and that it collects so noiselessly that even the Scandinavian god could not hear it. But such a reviewer would fail to do justice to the many excellent signs, to the signs of promise, in the book.

66

Versatility" is the word which defines Mr. Dole's productions, which are by turns light and sober, human and picturesque, cosmic and jocular. Such an epigrammatic couplet as

"I care not for theologies,

I only care for grace,"

makes you wish that Mr. Dole was always equally terse; for, like most men of versatile gifts, he is often "fatally" fluent. Once he catches a real lyric fervor, in the poem called "The Swallow." Here is the first stanza:

"Of all the birds that swim the air,

I'd rather be the swallow;

And, summer days, when days were fair,

I'd follow, follow, follow

The hurrying clouds across the sky,

And with the singing winds I'd fly."

To our ears that has more of the song in it than has anything else in this volume, or in several of the others; but we would not deny a certain haunting metrical charm to "The Wind in the Clearing," by Mr. Rogers. Especially commendable is it that he has found in a native experience the subject for a poem, and that he has wrought it out poetically. This is the more curious because Mr. Rogers's cultivated taste generally prefers old classic themes, Polyphemus, Odysseus, Fauns, the death of Argus, — all of which he treats with sympathy. He has evidently been structurally influenced by Matthew Arnold, which may be the reason why so many of his poems are worth reading more than once.

Mr. Newell's "Words for Music " belong to what one may call the earlier, straightforward sort of poetry. Here are no blurred dabs of emotion, no hazy impressions, no fumbling for aesthetic jargon all as plain as a pikestaff. Mr. Newell appears to particular advantage in pieces modeled after German Lieder and our older English ballads, but his range is wider than this. The ode for Decoration Day, for instance, is unusually good; and throughout one finds honest, wholesome thought.

- that is

"Poetry," says Mertel, "cannot be defined, but we all know it when we meet it. A true pen-and-ink drawing of a violet that is prose; add the purple beauty, the fragrance poetry." This saying comes to us as we read Mr. Bliss Carman's verse, which is certainly fragrant, often, we fear, too fragrant, like patchouly or sandalwood or musk. Yet it displays a more distinct metrical gift than any of the other writers in our list. For Mr. Carman metre and rhyme run almost as easily as for an

improvisatore. But his great defect is that he does not think clearly; his ideas have blurred edges; they lack logical sequence. We have read many pages in his book without knowing what he was driving at; the easy metre trickles over your mind as a woodland rill trickles over your hand in summer, producing a pleasant sensation but no distinct thought. Unfortunately, however, an idea insists now and then on forcing itself on you out of the ripple, and then you are irritated at being disturbed. If you have ever been teased by inability to make out a pattern in wall-paper, which at first struck you agreeably as a mass of color, you will understand how tantalizing this hide-and-seek with an idea may be.

And yet Mr. Carman has so many evidences of talent which, in a younger man, would justify a critic's large predictions, that we would urge him to foreswear Impressionists and Decadents, Verlaine and Francis Thompson, and all the other seductive ephemerals, and to practice lucidity, condensation, and thinking. Well for him if he could be shut up for six months with only Milton. To what end shall he possess even a seraph's rhythmic gift, if he have nothing to say; or, having something to say, cannot free it from a mass of irrelevant matter? In many of Mr. Carman's poems we discern much power, much charm, aimed at but not achieved, and occasional lines good enough to stand alone anywhere. We like his frank choice of words, though he sometimes verges on affectation; we respect, too, his evidently sincere veneration of beauty. Having so much, we wish him to have what alone gives permanence to poetry. The best of Mr. Meteyard's drawings recall Sambourne's wonderful effects in Punch, the inferior smack of aesthetic posters.

In "Folia Dispersa " we follow the progress of a cultivated mind one which, it appears, echoes in verse the great thoughts of the masters by whom it has been stirred. Professor Lawton does not convince us that he sings because he must, but because those whom he most reveres have sung, and he wishes to be like them. He has taste, cultivation, seriousness. He is cosmopolitan and polyglot, as testify such titles as "In Morte Immutabilitas," "Neue Frühlingsnacht," "Les Reines de l'Amour," and "La Commedia Finita." Still, there is good reading, viz. : —

Reproach me not! I could not love you so,
Were life not spent in Truth's eternal quest.

Tho' she roll back the curtain of the skies,
And show the mirrored face of baffled man,
Where I had pictured Heaven with childish eyes,
Truth is my guide alone. O friends of youth,
Old friends, old faiths, old ways where life began,
Farewell. I love you all. I follow Truth.

a

We close with reference to Mr. Howells's "Stops of Various Quills." We opened with Lowell—a chance Alpha and Omega, and yet, possibly, not unsignificant. Lowell, during the last fifteen years of his life, was our representative man of letters, man of culture, he stood for the best that education plus natural talents can produce. Mr. Howells represents the age of journalism in which we now live. He is, let us admit, its highest representative; but between him and Lowell and the older college-bred makers of American literature there is an unbridgeable gulf. The difference is not merely in the weaving, coarser or finer, as the case may be, but in the stuff woven. The best of Mr. Howells's work may be sublimated journalism, but sublimated journal

ism is not literature.

And yet of all the volumes of verse which we have been reviewing here, this of Mr. Howells has most interested us. Why? Because it has the first requisite of any writing of value — it deals with important topics. By and by the young jingle-men who fill Chapbooks and magazines with Swinburnian echoes will learn that tricks of metre never yet made a great poem; that the laureates of the next generation will be thinkers before they are rhymers, just as all true laureates have been. The Patchouly School of Versemen will pass, and silence and fresh air will be a relief without them. Meanwhile, praise to Mr. Howells for having written of things which adult minds can and do ponder without condescending. Yet here we must qualify our praise; for Mr. Howells has no ear for music, and his treatment of his subjects is often immature for his is a mind which has never mellowed. We confess that his poems leave an unwholesome flavor. It is not enough to write about Fate, Heredity, or Capital and Labor; they must be treated nobly to become poems. Mr. Howells, however, is a man of hobbies and impulses; he does not see life steadily and whole; he has that very uncomfortable organ — "a heart in the right place," that beats very hard for any latest "cause," but is uncontrolled by a mind of broad and deep culture.

The result is sentimental half-truths, unripeness even in pessimism, and an impression that everything, including the cosmic laws against which he protests, are sordid, petty. Omar Khayyám, the evident inspirer of many of these pieces, may preach pessimism equally black, but he always compels us to recognize the grandeur of the great scheme in which we are all involved. Mr. Howells, as has been well said, berates the cosmic process for sending us this scurvy existence at all, and he scolds it much worse for obliging us to quit it. We had marked many examples of limping metre or prosaic phrase, but instead of them we will quote these specimens, which show Mr. Howells at his best:

CALVARY.

If He could doubt on His triumphant cross,
How much more I in the defeat and loss

Of seeing all my selfish dreams fulfilled,

Of having lived the very life I willed,

Of being all that I desired to be?

My God, my God! Why hast thou forsaken me?

CONSCIENCE.

Judge me not as I judge myself, O Lord!
Show me some mercy, or I may not live:
Let the good in me go without reward;
Forgive the evil I must not forgive.

TO-MORROW.

Old fraud, I know you in that gay disguise,
That air of hope, that promise of surprise :
Beneath your bravery, as you come this way,
I see the sordid presence of To-day;

And I shall see there, long ere you are gone,
All the dull Yesterdays that I have known.

We shut the book with a feeling that whatever its value as poetry, it reveals the fundamental disappointment of its author. Not even all the notoriety and wealth that have come to him by his realistic pictures of "the sordid presence of To-day " have satisfied him; for he has aspired to create literature, and has remained imprisoned in his journalist's temperament. Mr. Howard Pyle's illustrations strike us as affected. One tires of seeing an imaginary Mr. Howells, in seraph plumes and much-creased drapery, holding a wine-cup to his own or some other symbolical