Rhymes and Legends. By Mrs. Acton Tindal. With a prefatory
Memoir. (Bentley.)—Mrs. Acton Tindal was an accomplished writer of verse, which, to say the least, often comes near to being poetry. Many things in this volume are good, nothing strikes us as excellent, as worthy of a place in a collection of best things. "The Infanti- eide " is, perhaps, the strongest piece in the book. It is a really noble expression of the "larger hope" which alone makes endurable some aspects of human life. The whole of the poems which are in- cluded under the title of "The Eve of All Souls" are good, "The Cry of the Oppressed" being especially noteworthy, as is also "The Rising of the Children," though the latter is, to our thinking, some- what disfigured by a material conception of the Resurrection. The chief fault of the volume is the want of compression and vigour. Who will not feel that the eight pages of ballad verse, entitled ." The Phantom Hand," do not leave anything like the impres- sion on the mind that is made by the few lines of prose which preface it, and which tell us how, when Sir Walter Long, on his death-bed, would have disinherited his eldest son, at the solicitation of his second wife, the clerk who sat up to engross the deed "perceived the shadow of a hand on the parchment ;" and "by-and-by, a fine white hand interposed between his work and the candle, and he could discern that it was a woman's ?"
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