The School-Boy. By Oliver Wendell Holmes. (Routledge.)--This poem was read
at the Centennial Celebration of Phillips's Academy, Andover, Massachusets, a school which had the honour of educating the writer, and which possibly is in part indebted for the respect- able antiquity which it has attained, to that distinction. Mr. Holmes dwells, with a quaint mixture of humour and pathos, on the familiar topics which such a celebration suggests, and if he introduces little that is new, always expresses himself with freshness and grace. Our readers will be glad to see a specimen of his work :- " A new Prometheus tips our wands with fire, A mightier Orpheus strains the whispering wire, Whose lightning-thrills the lazy winds outrun, And hold the hours as Joshua stayed the Sun,— So swift, in truth, we hardly find a place For those dim fictions kuown as Time and Space. Still a new miracle each year supplies,— See at his work the Chemist of the Skies, Who questions Sirius in his tortured rays, And steals the secret of the solar blaze. Hush, while the window-rattling bugles play The ration's airs a hundred miles away ! That wicked phonograph ! hark, how it swears! Turn it again, and make it say its prayers. And was it true, then, what the story said Of Oxford's friar, and his brazen head ? While wondering Science stands, herself perplexed At each day's miracle, and asks, ' What next ?' The immortal boy, the coming heir of all, Springs from his desk to ' urge the flying ball,' Cleaves with his bending oar the glassy waves, With sinewy arm the dashing current braves, The same bright creature in this haunt of ours That Eton shadowed with her antique towers.' "
The illustrations are, for tho most part, excellent, but in the "Boat- race," the nearer of the two boats is not a success. The rowers seem to be holdiug the boat steady, rather than rowing.
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