BOOKS.

MR. PERCY GREG'S POEMS.*

Mn. PERCY GREG'S verses are good or indifferent almost pre- cisely in proportion to the strain and tension of the sense of battle upon him while he was writing them. The only exception to this statement is the rather graphic piece on the wandering Jew, which is inserted, rather like a fly in amber, in the first poem in the book, a poem otherwise decidedly wanting in char- acter and force. There is nothing of either intellectual or moral fight in this picture of 'the wandering Jew,' but the conception itself has evidently taken some hold of Mr. Greg's rather oratorical imagination, as it has of many an author, orator, and poet before him, and so given an edge and vividness to lines of which the motive is a mere moral picture, and not in any sense a contro- versial battle-cry. With this exception, you may judge pretty well of the worth of every piece in this little volume by the -amount of challenge to hostile opinion which it contains. The three first poems, except the interwoven one we have just men- tioned, contain a certain amount of sentiment and a certain amount of eloquent disquisition, but there is no distinct impression remaining when we have finished them; they do not leave any living trace upon us. Then we come to a supposed self-defence of 'Julian the Apostate' for his war against Christianity, and we immediately begin to feel that Mr. Greg has fire in him, however 'little we may sympathise with the drift of his imaginary apology, and however little, indeed, that apolog,ymay agree with the actual faith of

-Julian, whom Gibbon, at least, believed to be a sincere worshipper of the deities of Greece and Rome, and who, so far from enter- taining anydoubt of his own immortality, is said to have discoursed to the mourners round his death-bed of the immediate approach of the moment when his soul should be enthroned among the -stars. Next come some eloquent lines depicting how much nobler in the sight of God is a sincere Atheist who dies for his belief, though the belief be the deepest of errors, than are the official priests of God who would sanction his martyrdom :—

"His limbs to the fatal stake are bound; He bath looked his last on the world around. The dense smoke curleth, the flames leap high— So, saith the world, should an Atheist die.

To the winds of Heaven are the ashes strewn; 'rhe spirit stands in the World Unknown.

And 'Welcome!' pealed from the hosts on high ; 'He hath merited life who hath dared to die

'Knowing not God, then hart served Him well,

When His chosen priests were the slaves of Hell He to the Throne shall be ever nigh Who, without God, for God's Truth could die.'"

• Interleaves Os the Wort-day Prose of Twenty Years. By Percy Greg. London: Trilbner. 1875. But surely it is hardly dying for "God's Truth," though it is dying for his truthfulness, a sufficiently noble but leas glorious thing, to die, however courageously and sincerely, for the belief in human error. Admit Mr. Greg's assumptions, which no one can well deny to be possible assumptions,—that a sincere lover of truth, who has toiled and prayed for light he could not find, and has kept faithful to all the moral light be had, might be called upon to die for the sincerity with which he avows his own in- capacity to discern God, and we cannot but accept his conclusion that recognising no God, such a man would yet be serving the God he could not recognise, in the very mode and moment of his death. Still, the difficulty of the assumption lies in its nature. This absoluteness and imperiousness of the voice of duty is rarely recognised by one who does not also see in it the will of God. And as a rule, it has undoubtedly been true that those who have declared that for them the throne of Heaven was empty, have also been often disposed to find the distinctions between right and wrong uncertain, wavering, and subordinate to considerations of policy. That the Atheist cannot, and does not, live "without God in the world," though he may deny, or ignore, or simply fail to recognise God, no true Theist can question for a moment. But it is a little difficult to conceive that luminous and devoted attitude of soul which is needed for the true martyr, in one who finds no more in the voice of conscience than a verdict of personal opinion on a knotty question of conduct. However, this criticism does not apply to the following lines, some of the most striking in the volume, in which Mr. Greg asks with great force and brilliance if it be not in every sense a leas terrible thing for a sincere Atheist to die, than to live, with that blank before his soul where God ought to be :— "Yes! thou mayst ask ! They waste their breath

Who threat thee with the spectre Death.

Is peace more fearful, then, than strife Hath Death more need of God than Life ?

If man can live without Him, why Should man without Him fear to die?

The steadfast soul, the manly breast, Dread not the long and dreamless rest ; The rest that calms the griefs of life, The storm, the sorrow, and the strife,

The wrung heart's tear, tho worn heart's sigh—

Why should the Atheist fear to die?

From whence we came or where we go, Nor God hath told nor man may know.

If that be Truth our eyes can see, If all beyond be vacancy, And prayer a dream, and creeds a lie, Why should the Atheist fear to die?

And if, as I believe, above

There reigns the Lord of Light and Love—

Trust Him, unflinching! It was He Who gave the sight that failed to see!

If He be just who reigns on high, Why should the Atheist fear to die ?

His Sun, unseen through clouds, can give The light by which His creatures live.

So, through the mists our eyes that dim, He sees the soul that sees not Him;

Unknown, He knows; unfelt, is nigh—

Why should the Atheist fear to die ?

Through 'wildering doubts and errant creed He sees pure thought and honest deed.

Not by the standard but the strife, Not by the lips but by the life, He knows His own, Beneath His eye Why should the Atheist fear to die ?

Doubt may the deeper reverence prove,

And blinder Faith nurse feebler Love.

Whose seeks Truth, albeit he err, God counts him for a worshipper.

He loves the soul that loathes a lie ;- Why should the Atheist fear to die?"

That is very fine, and there is no answer conceivable to it as regards any form of Atheism which is the sincere, though it must be the temporary, result of the strange mysteries, the darkness, and the moral perplexities of life, and not rather a cowering of the con- science before a power it dreads to face. But that there are both forms of Atheism no one who knows his own heart can doubt; and whenever it is the latter which mingles, however faintly, with the former, it is pretty clear that the Atheist would fear to die, for just the same reason for which a child fears to draw back a curtain behind which it suspects that somebody whom it has distrusted and avoided, even though somebody full of love for it, is standing concealed. To a sincerely convinced Atheist, whose Atheism is purely intellectual, Death is not a curtain, but the end. Yet very few, we suspect, so feel it. In almost all of us there is a half- belief, if not a full belief, in a world behind the veil, and with it a feeling that we have made too light of those deeper yearnings of the soul which have had for their object that dim world beyond. However, we are here concerned less with Mr. Greg's doctrine than with his verse, though, as we have said, his verse depends so much for its excellence on the chivalric yearning for battle with which he is filled when he writes it, that it is far more natural, in his case, to address oneself to the substance of his belief as well as to his forms of expression, than it would be in the case of most other poets.

We do not admire so much the form of the more direct though

often eloquent expressions of religious feeling in which no type of error is attacked. Mr. Greg is nothing if not militant. His squib against the women's rights movement is full of scorn,—too scornful and ferocious indeed for its subject,—but of course, the better as a lampoon for that. So the satiric verses of political" definitions,'' and the admirable pieces of rhetoric called "The Decadence of England, 1870," and " Swculum," are all good, in their own keen- edged, onesided fashion. Indeed, perhaps the best of all the verses, except those we have quoted in full, are the passionate panegyrics on "the Lost Cause" of the Southern States, into which Mr. Greg throws his whole eloquence. That cause, we need hardly say, seems to Ss one of the worst of which history has any record. The desire to develop as well as to preserve slavery was its very mainspring, and so far as the statesmen who devised and matured the revolt were concerned, we do not believe that there was more than one among them who can boast of a pure and spot- less fame. We are, however, quite willing to admit that among the soldiers,—who could hardly be expected to judge their cause from first principles,—there were several as noble as the noblest soldiers of the North. Still Mr. Greg, who, as we have seen in the case of Julian the Apostate, has rather a leaning to "Lost Causes," is quite entitled, of course, as a poet, to put the best face on the cause of the Southern States which the circumstances will admit of, and we must do him the justice to say that he keeps the great and incurable vice of the Southern cause completely out of sight. For him there is nothing in the struggle but the patriotic love of independence, the gallant resistance to a corrupt and despotic host of selfish invaders. No one can fail to find the true ring of passion in the following lines THE NINTH OF APRIL, 1865. "It is a nation's death-cry ! Yes; the agony is past :

The stoutest race that over fought to-day hath fought its last.

Ay: start and shudder; well thou mayst I well veil thy weeping eyes!

England, may God forgive thy part ; Man cannot but despise.

Yes, shudder at that cry that speaks the South's supreme despair, Thou that couldst save and savedst not ; that wonldst and didst not dare !

Thou that hadst might to aid the right and heart to brook the wrong; Weak words of comfort for the weak ; strong hand to help the strong!

That land, the garden of thy wealth, one haggard waste appears, The ashes of her sunny homes are slaked with patriot tears. Tears for the slain who died in vain for freedom on the field ; Tears, tears of bitterer anguish still for those that live—to yield.

The cannon of his country pealed Stuart's funeral knell ; Her soldiers' cheers rang in his ears as Stonewall Jackson fell. Onward o'er gallant Ashby's grave swept War's triumphant tide, And Southern hopes were living yet, when Polk and Morgan died.

But he, the leader on whose word those captains loved to wait, The noblest, bravest, best of all, bath found a harder fate. Unscathed by shot and steel he passed through many a desperate field ; 0 God, that he hath lived so long, and only lived—to yield !

Along the war-worn wasted ranks that loved him to the last, With saddened face and weary pace the vanquished chieftain passed. Their own hard lot the men forgot ; they felt what his. must be ; What thoughts in that dark hour must wring the heart of General Lee.

The manly cheek with tears was wet, the stately head was bowed, As breaking from their shattered ranks around his steed they crowd. ' I did my best for you :"twas all those quivering lips could say ; Ah, happy those whom death hath spared the anguish of to-day !

Weep on, Virginia! weep the lives given to thy cause in vain ; The sena who live to wear once more the Union's galling chain; The homes whoselight is quenched for aye ; the graves without a stone ; The folded flag, the broken sword, the hope for ever flown.

Yet raise thy head, fair laud! thy dead died bravely for the right ; The folded flag is stainless still, the broken sword is bright. No blot is on thy record found ; no treason soils thy fame : Weep thou thy dead :—with covered head we mourn our England's shame!"

It is not, of course, the highest kind of poetry which breathes the spirit of a fight. Poetry has a wider and richer field than the field of battle. But Mr. Percy Greg's poetry is hardly ever striking without a touch of invective in it, and it is that aptitude for invective,--invective, no doubt, noble in its kind,—which gives to his verse that "lyrical cry" which otherwise it wants. Every poem in this little book which breathes either indig- nation, or defiance, or scorn, is full of vigour and eloquence, and generally also of a sort of intensity of emotion, which together make the verse rememberable.