THREE BOOKS OF VERSE.* In the present collection, Mr. Story

gives us, reclassified and renamed, such portions of the contents of his three volumes as his maturer judgment approves, together with some pieces that have hitherto appeared only in a fugitive form, and some that are now printed for the first time.

Mr. Story's dramatic and lyrical-dramatic studies—which form the bulk of his collection—would no doubt have won for their author a recognised place among the poets of the genera- tion but for the fact that they are saturated with the spirit of Mr. Browning. We can hardly recall an instance in which a writer of no inconsiderable intellectual power has worked so per- sistently—not to say so ostentatiously—in the manner of a great contemporary without any apparent consciousness of the fact.

This imitativeness goes mach deeper than the mere catching of certain superficial tricks of an infectious style,—indeed, it may be said that Mr. Story generally avoids his master's more eccentric mannerisms ; it is the adoption of a literary method, almost of an intellectual standpoint. The highest praise, therefore, that can be awarded to the great body of Mr. Story's work is that of successful reproduction. And it must farther be said that though our author has absorbed so much of the spirit of Mr. Browning, he has not learned the secret of those marvellous touches—those profound and pregnant lines—which lay bare to us the heart of an individual or of an epoch. We will give a favourable sample of Mr. Story's work, taken from the poem which he places first in his collection, "A Roman Lawyer in Jerusalem :"—

" Marcus, abiding in Jerusalem, Greeting to Caius, hie best friend, in Rome !

Salve ! these presents will be borne to you

By Lucius, who is wearied with this place, Sated with travel, looks upon the East As simply hateful—blazing, barren, bleak — And longs again to find himself in Rome.

After the tumult of its streets, its trains Of slaves and clients, and its villas cool With marble porticoes beside the sea,

And friends and banquets,—more than all, its games,—

This life seems blank and flat. He pants to stand In its vast circus all alive with heads And quivering arms and floating robes,—the air

Thrilled by the roaring fremitus of men,—

The sunlit awning heaving overhead, Swollen and strained against its corded veins,

And flapping out its hem with load report,— The wild beasts roaring from the pit below,—

The wilder crowd responding from above With one long yell that sends the startled blood With thrill and sudden flush into the cheeks,— A hundred trumpets screaming,—the dull thump

Of horses galloping across the sand,— The clang of scabbards, the sharp clash of steel,— Live swords, that whirl a circle of gray fire,—

Brass helmets flashing 'neath their streaming hair,— A universal tam:ilk—then a hush Worse than the tumult—all eyes straining down

To the arena's pit—all lips set close—

All muscles strained,—and then that sudden yell,

Ha bet !—That's Rome, says Lucius: so it is !

That is, 'tis his Rome,—'tis not yours and mine."

To this poem—in which he holds a brief for Judas Iscariot— Mr. Story evidently attaches peculiar importance. He tells us in his preface that it now appears "very considerably enlarged by new views of the facts, and the evidence in the case of Judas, which, it is believed, will be found greatly to strengthen the argument." According to Mr. Story's view, Judas was an enthusiast, profoundly convinced of the Divine power of Christ, and the Betrayal was an attempt to force Him into an unmis- takable and final exhibition of that power. We hardly think, however, that Mr. Story can claim credit for being the originator of this ingenious, if somewhat far-fetched, defence of "the traitor." We are not quite clear as to the date of the publica- tion of Mr. Story's earlier version of "The Roman Lawyer ;" but it is certain that Dr. Hanna, in his "Last Day of Our Lord's Passion," published nearly twenty years ago, put forward a substantially identical theory as to the motive of the Betrayal. But whether its original conception be his or not, Mr. Story's defence is a powerful and admirably-wrought piece of pleading.

On the whole, it is as a lyrist that our author pleases us most. Not nnfrequently we feel in his songs that passionate abandon which is the very essence of lyrical poetry. It is in

* Poems. By William Wetmore Story. 2 vols. Edinburgh and London : William Blackwood and Sons.—Somnia Medici. By John A. Goodchild. Second Scrim London : Kagan Paul, Trench, and 00.—Verses: Translated and Original. By H. G. Keene. . London.: W. H. Allen and Co. -

"Cleopatra "—a poem of the lyrical-dramatic order—that this quality is most conspicuously present. It impresses us all the more, because the author has been at manifest pains about the grouping of all his accessory effects. There is a rush about such lines as these—in which the passionate Queen recalls ante-natal days, when she had the life of a tigress—which carries everything before it

"I will lie and dream of the past time,

Alms of thought away,

And through the jungle of memory

Loosen my fancy to play; When a smooth and velvety tiger, Ribbed with yellow and black,

Supple and cushion-footed,

I wandered, where never the track Of a human creature had rustled The silence of mighty woods, And, fierce in a tyrannous freedom, I knew but the law of my moods. The elephant, trumpeting, started, When he heard my footstep near, And the spotted giraffes tied wildly In a yellow cloud of fear.

I sucked in the noontide splendour, Quivering along the glade, Or yawning, panting, and dreaming, Basked in the tamarisk shade, Till I heard my wild mate roaring, As the shadows of night came on, To brood in the trees' thick branches, And the shadow of sleep was gone; Then I roused, and roared in answer, And unsheathed from my cushioned feet My curving claws, and stretched me, And wandered my mate to greet.

We toyed in the amber moonlight Upon the warm flat sand,

And struck at each other our massive arms,—

How powerful he was and grand !

His yellow eyes flashed fiercely As he crouched and gazed at me,

And his quivering tail, like a serpent,

'Twitched curving nervously.

Then like a storm he seized me, With a wild, triumphant cry, And we met, as two clouds in heaven When the thunders before them fly.

We grappled and struggled together, For his love, like his rage, was rude ; And his teeth in the swelling folds of my neck At times, in our play, drew blood."

The italicised line—and the poem contains several as weak and ungainly—is a palpable blot, and to " loosen " is not quite the same thing as to "let loose ; " but the piece is instinct with a fierce and fervid life which gives it the right to live.

In any estimate of Mr. Story as a poet, account must be taken of his genuine feeling for natural beauty, and his remarkable power of transcribing a landscape. Sometimes, as in the lines called "At Dieppe," he gives us as veritable a picture as if the medium of its presentation had been the brush, and not the pen.

Dr. Goodchild is so well pleased with the reception accorded by the critics to his former volume, that he pays them the rather embarrassing compliment of dedicating to them his new venture. At the risk of being found guilty of the unmannerly offence of looking a gift-horse in the mouth, we will set down very briefly the impressions which we have received from the second series of Somnia Medici.

We should hardly like to say of Dr. Goodchild that be "ran through each mode of the lyre, and was master of all," but he has certainly handled a great number of widely-sundered themes in very varied manners. In fact, he tries to cover too much ground. His sonnets, for example, scarcely get beyond a decent mediocrity, and there is not much singing in his songs. There are extensive arid tracts in his book which, had not a sense of duty sustained no, we should hardly have traversed to the end, and there is one tract—" The Lyrical Remains of the late David Auldjo, Esq.,"—which not even that consciousness could carry us through. However, the pervading heaviness of a large proportion of Dr. Goodchild's book—of weakness or flabbinese we have very seldom to complain—is amply compensated by two or three poems of very unusual excellence. "Sister Seraphina " is a portrait drawn in vitriol. In savage strength, its sarcasm has seldom been surpassed. The last line is almost terrible :—

" She brings her soul up in the straitest schools, Lacing expansions in with narrow rules.

She purges out her dross, and yields her goods

To swell the funds of needy sisterhoods. She deems thin blood white milk of innocence, And fasting, findeth hope of recompense.

She tethers thought from flight in open air To turn the treadmill of repeated prayer.

She slays each soft emotion Love bath given

To make burnt.offerings to the 'Host of heaven;'

And, seeing beggars serve His golden door, Bows down and serves the Mammon of the poor.

Behold, her soul is small, and pinched, and thin, Surely it shall find crannies and crawl in, And contrite, plead in heaven's warmer glow, Lord, this my leprosy was white—like snow.'"

Whenever Dr. Goodchild treats a mystical or parabolic theme, he "finds himself" unmistakably. "A Parable of the Spirit" —which tells how a dead maiden revisited the upper earth, and read the hearts of those dearest to her, finding strange surprises

in them—is a very beautiful and suggestive poem, flowing on with a pure and liquid melody. "A Parable of the Spirit "— in some sense a companion poem to the one just mentioned—

reaches a yet higher level. It is a mediawal story, and relates how a certain knight, tempted to fleshly sin by an evil spirit in the guise of a pure and beautiful maiden, seeks sanctuary in the minster, and there, strengthened by supernatural aids, smites the temptress, himself falling dead as he strikes the blow. But good as are these two poems, Dr. Goodchild's volume contains one piece of yet more notable achievement. "The Organ-Builder" —the germ of which our author derived, at second-hand, front some German story or legend—is a poem of tender and haunting loveliness. Its motive is this. An organ-builder, a unique master of his craft, fashions a great instrument in a spirit of such love and reverence that his whole soul passes into it. Its harmonies are the utterance of his spirit. But, beyond this, they become so blended with the eternal harmony that they draw forth from every heart whatever in it is meet to swell the strain. Upon this beautiful fancy is grafted a love-story of rare depth and pathos. We should only spoil it by trying to compress it into a few lines of prose.

Mr. Keene's translations from the French, German, Persian, and Latin, in his Verses : Translated and Original, are rough and clever. Though their lack of finish is a serious drawback to one's enjoyment of them, they flow with a lyrical freedom that is uncommon in translations. The poem which opens the collection deserves an individual word of praise. It is a condensed version—based on the views of Davidson and Ewald—of the "Song of Songs." Mr. Keene throws the dramatic quality of the poem into strong relief.

Everybody who studies his rendering will gain a conception.

possibly erroneous, but certainly definite, of the general plan and movement of the Divine pastoral. By the way, why does

Mr. Keene speak twice over of "hosts with banners flown," unless he means to say that the banners had flown away ?

And, while we are querying, why does he, in another place, talk about a "lady friend P" We thought that young persons in millinery establishments had the monopoly of that expression. Of Mr. Keene's original poems, while a good many are mediocre, and several decidedly poor, two or three are excellent. "In Memoriam" is a very sweet and tender little elegy. "A Modern Eclogue" shows that the author might accomplish a good deal in the way of light satire. But, to our mind, the best thing in the whole book is "Autumn." What could be better than the following as a bit of landscape ?—

" Shnt-to the lattice; make it fast ;

The wind has turned austere and cold ; And, borne upon the funeral blast, The first dead leaf's poor corpse behold.

Last month the land was gemmed with sheaves, And clothed in multitudinous green ; Now, shivering under waning leaves, The furrows gape, the forests lean.

The year's warm soul, the honest sun, Is swooning ; more and more we see The silent landscape's skeleton, The woodland's grim anatomy."