POETRY.

MATER SEVERA.

WHERE the huge Atlantic swings heavy water eastward,

Ireland, square to meet it, shoulders off the seas; Wild are all her coasts with stress of cliff and billow, On her northern moorland is little sheltered ease.

Well is with the salmon, ranger of her rivers : Well is with the mackerel shoaling in each bay, Dear is all the land to the lonely snipe and curlew: Ay, but for its manfolk : a bitter lot have they.

Thankless is the soil : men trench, and delve, and labour, Black and spongy peat amid barren knowes of stone : Then to win a living overseas they travel, And their women gather, if God pleases, what was sown.

Harvesters, a-homing from the golden tilth of England, Where they sweat to cope with increase of teeming years, Find too oft returning, sick with others' plenty, Sunless autumn dank upon green and spindling ears.

Or a tainted south wind brings upon the root-crop Stench of rotting fibre and green leaf turning black : Famine, never distant, stalks nearer now and nearer,

Bids them rake like crows amid mussel-beds and wrack.

Bleak and grey to man is the countenance of Nature; Bleak her soil below him, bleak her sky above; Wherefor, then, by man is her rare smile so cherished?

Paid her niggard bounty with so lavish love P

Not the slopes of Rhine with such yearning are remembered;

Not your Kentish orchards, not your Devon lanes. 'Tis as though her sons for that ungentle mother

Knew a mother's tenderness, felt a mother's pains.

Many an outward-bound, as the ship heads under Tory, Clings with anguished eyes to the barren Paned shore. Many a homeward-bound, as they lift the frowning Foreland, Pants to leap the league to his desolate Gweedore.

There about the ways God's air is free and spacious :

Warm are chimney-corners there, warm the kindly heart: There the soul of man takes root, and through its travail

Grips the rocky anchorage till the life-strings part.

STEPHEN GWYNN.