MR. RAMAL'S " SONGS OF CHILDHOOD." * THOUGH there is

much of the essentially poetic quality in

Mr. Ramal's verse, it is no easy matter to classify his Muse. " Songs of Childhood" is not altogether a satisfactory title,

though it applies in a sense to a majority of the pieces in the collection. That is to say, they deal with certain emotions, experiences, and illusions of childhood, and are all more or less inspired by the recollection of fairy-lore. Only once or twice, as in " The Fly," which begins- " How large unto the tiny fly

Must little things appear !— A rosebud like a feather bed, Its prickle like a spear"— does he adopt or maintain the standpoint of R. L. Stevenson in his Child's Garland of Verse. Indeed we fear that the modern matron, deeply versed in the science of paedology, will probably place this freakish volume on the index expur- gatorius of the nursery on the score of its obscurantist

tendencies. For the Muse of Ramal consorts not only with gnomes and elves, but with dwarfs, goblins, ogres, and other disputable companions, her habits are bizarre, even macabre, and she occasionally utters an eldritch note. The sentiment of "Tartary," for example, is irreconcilable with a due regard to the principles of thrift:—

" If I were Lord of Tartary,

Myself and me alone, My bed should be of ivory, Of beaten gold my throne ; And in my court should peacocks flaunt, And in my forests tigers haunt, And in my pools great fishes slant Their fins athwart the sum If I were Lord of Tartary, I'd wear a robe of beads, White, and gold, and green they'd be, And small, and thick as seeds; And ere should wane the morning star, I'd don my robe and scimitar,

And zebras seven should draw my car Through Tartary's dark glades."

In proof of the riotous extravagance of this echo of Xanadu we may note that even Mr. Walter Rothschild has never harnessed more than four zebras. Another figure demanding all the fortitude of "grown-ups" to contemplate with equanimity is the ogre of Trebarwith Yale, who-

" Snorted as the billows snort In darkness of the night,

Betwixt his lean locks tawny-swart He glowered on the eight,"

• Songs of Chidhood, By Welter Banal. London : Longman and Co, . 8d. neta

and balked of his prey " strode, enormous, swiftly home whinnying down the dale." Another poem in Mr. Ramal's most bizarre vein is that of the three dwarfs who dwelt in the Isle of Lone, whose names were Alliolyle, Lallerie, and Muziomone, and whose exploits remind one of the enchanting and "meloobious" nonsense verses of Mr. Edward Lear

"At dawn they fished, at noon they snared Young foxes in the dells,

At even on dew-berries they fared, And blew in their twisted shells.

Dark was the sea they gambolled in, And thick with silver fish,

Dark as green glass blown clear and thin To be a monarch's dish.

They sate to sup in a jasmine bower, Lit pale with flies of fire, Their bowls the hue of the iris flower, And lemon their attire."

But though Mr. Ramal's imagination revels in the grotesque, the sinister, the sombre, and the malign, he never lets his goblins get the best of it, while some of the most impressive pieces in the collection are those in which the atmosphere is that of pure romance. One may note in particular the ex- tremely delicate fancy which animates the narrative poem called " The Phantom," in which a child, sent alone by night on an errand through the long corridors of a great house, is

relieved of its terrors by meeting the spirit of another child "pining for love not found on earth." In this charming poem there occurs one of the many fine phrases that Mr. Ramal has coined. He speaks of the child-phantom having eyes that were " of the azure fire that hovers in wintry flame." More than once he is able to crowd a whole picture into a single word, as when he speaks of the miller's " toppling wheel." His gift of striking images may be illustrated by a stanza from " The Lamplighter " :- " He is like a needlewoman

Who deftly on a sable hem Stitches in gleaming jewels ; Or, haply, he is like a hero, Whose bright deeds on the long journey Are beacons on our way."

Mr. Ramal more than once uses the unrhymed stanza or quatrain,—nowhere with more effect than in the charming piece

called " Cecil" :— "Ye little elves, rcno haunt sweet &its,

Where flowers with the dew commu e, I pray you hush the child, Cecil, With windlike Eng. O little elves, so white she lieth, Each eyelid gentler than the fl )w 'r

Of the bramble, and her fleecy hair

Like smoke of gold.

O little elves, her hands and feet The angels muse upon, and God Rath shut a glimpse of Paradise In each blue eye.

O little elves, her tiny body Like a white flake of snow it is, Drooping upon the pale green hold Of the chill snowdrop.

O little elves, with elderflower, And pimpernel, and the white trivvti orn, Sprinkle the journey of her dream And, little elves, Call to her magically sweet Lest of her very tenderness She do forsake this rough brown earth And return to us no more.'

Mr. Ramal handles his metre with a cavalier freedom, and we cannot reconcile ourselves wholly to some of his rhymes,— e.g.," mandoline " and "wine " or "trees " and "loneliness." He is, moreover, perhaps over-enamoured at times of the recon- dite, the exotic, the bizarre; his experiments in fantastic nomenclature are not always successful, though he is keenly alive to the decorative value of proper names in verse ; and the juxtaposition of the grotesque and the colloquial strikes now and then a jarring note. But when criticism has done its worst, there is something more than promise in this little book. Its faults are essentially those of youth ; its merits are already so clearly defined as to appeal to all who love to be guided back along what a German poet calls "the beloved way, to the fairyland of childhood."