BOOKS.

MR. BUCHANAN'S POEMS.* WoaDswoarn has often been spoken of as a poet completely out- side the direct line of poetic tradition, as standing apart in a still backwater, is it were, from the great stream of our national poetry, —as being without parent and without offspring. Whatever may be the truth as to the former point,—and we readily admit that we know of nothing like Wordsworth before Wordsworth,—it cer- tainly cannot be said since the publication of David Gray's lyrics and Mr. Buchanan's fresh idyls that he is without poetical off- spring. The former of the two indeed, the brilliant young poet whose Vale sweet light rose only to set before its brightness had been seen except by the eyes of the few, had much more in him of Wordsworth than has Mr. Buchanan. His genius was fed from the lyrical side of Wordsworth, while Mr. Buchanan's has been fed from that perhaps less striking side of his genius which delighted in the meditative delineation of simple village characters and

of natural griefs or joys. Not that even Wordsworth's genius was eminently lyrical. He kept the themes of his poetry too steadily at the focus of his own meditative thought, as an astrono- mer steadily keeps the image of the star he is observing in the centre of his reflecting mirror, to give the full involuntary rush of lyric emotion to his verse. If the adjective 'lyrical' implies perfect spontaneousness, as to a large degree we think it does, David Gray's poetry is even more lyrical than his master's. Its rhythm suggests the musical lapse of falling waters more distinctly to our ears. Wordsworth's deepest and fullest lyrics suggest the strong and rapturous plunges of a mind swimming freely and alone in the infinite ocean of Nature, David Gray's far thinner and fainter but yet sweeter strains, the flowing away of the very essence of his own nature in streams of melody-. But if David Gray took his inspiration from the most lyrical side of Wordsworth's genius, Mr. Buchanan takes his from the most dramatic,—perhaps we ought to say the least undramatic,—side. In such poems as the very fine ones on "Michael," "The Mad Mother," "The Idiot Boy," and some others, Wordsworth showed a very considerable power of entering up to a certain point into the emotions of other minds, though he never failed to steep them with something of his own meditative rapture. It is from this side of his poetry that Mr. Buchanan seems to have fed his own mind,—such poems as "Willie Baird" and "Poet Andrew," for instance, reminding us in their type Of Wordsworth's "Michael," though showing less meditative genius than Wordsworth, and borrowing just a shade of the long- drawn dramatic sketches of Browning. The chief characteristic in which David Gray and Robert Buchanan alike resemble Wordsworth is the cool, white, transparent tone of their thoughts, the absence of prismatic colour, of multiplex ornament, in their workmanship,-,-the complete predominance of the single concep- tion which runs through the whole, over the various elements which constitute the parts. Tennyson's workmanship is all rich,— Browning's is all grotesque and singular ; in both, the whole is sometimes forgotten in the richness or the odd emphasis of the parts. But in Wordsworth every picture is imaged on the cool surface of deep still water, which mellows the colours, softens the lines, and gives each a wholeness of effect. And here both David Gray and Mr. Buchanan resemble their master. Theirs is not the poetry of metaphor, simile, or imaginative tours de force. There is always some single thought or mood of which the poem is an embodi- ment, and which is as simple and transparent in structure as a crystal. There is nothing tropical in either of them. The moun- taineer poet has been succeeded by other mountaineer poets. The mountain stream ripples audibly in both ; the "power of hills" is on both ; in both the wild flower is a deeper passion than the garden flower.

But though true of Mr. Buchanan, it is less true of him than of his hapless brother poet. Mr. Buchanan's poems, as we have already hinted, are less simple in structure, less crystalline, less entire, partly perhaps because they are less lyrical and enter deeper into the minds of others, than David Gray's. Their form is less perfect, their rhythm less musical, their breath of inspira- tion less pure, anti less free from half assimilated materials, but the materials which Mr. Buchanan strives to assimilate are more various and rich than those of David Gray's clear, thrilling, and delicate musings on the beauty of Nature. On the other hand, also, it is quite possible that Mr. Buchanan's poems promise for his genius a fuller and mire vigorous growth. He has been advised by an able and friendly critic,—and no critic who has any

• Idea and Legends of Inoerburn. By Rvbert Wu:Lamm Lmloa : Mu:ander Strahaa. true feeling for poetry can do anything but echo that advice—to abstain in future from his little legendary fancies, his elves, and fays, and trolls, and the rest of them, and stick to real and simple life, in the semi-dramatic delineation of which his true power lies. There is as broad a gulf between the poetry of "Poet Andrew," or "Willie Baird," or the beautiful "London Idyl" he recently pub- lished in the Fortnightly Review, as there is between Tennyson'a "Ulysses" and his "Airy, Fairy Lilian,"—between the pleasure which sinks deep into the imagination and the heart, and the pleasure, if there be any, in a gentle tickling of the fancy. So deeply do we feel this, that we do not think it worth while to criticize Mr. Buchanan's fays and elves at all. We have read them, as in duty bound, but found them very fatiguing elves and fays indeed. There is a little party in particular, who is supposed to derive her fairy life from some young lady's farewell kiss to her lover, but whom we suspect of a very different origin, say a drop of ipecacuanha wine left at the bottom of perhaps the same young woman's febrifuge medicine. She is a very sickly little party indeed.

"Willie Baird" and "Poet, Andrew" are quite the finest poems in the volume, both being not only true, sweet, and simple pictures of rural life, but both of them also steeped in the glow of a poetic light, suggested by, but distinct from, the stories themselves, and which gives them a perfect unity, an ideal unity, which does not hurt the realism, of their own. Thus in "Willie Baird," the story of the little pupil lost in the snow blends itself, in the mind of the old man who tells it, with the mountains, snows, and tempests of his own boyish Northern home, and it is the touchstone of his passionate attachment to his little scholar, that the lad and his story constantly turn back his mind to dwell with a sort of melancholy rapture on boyish visions till then almost blotted out from his memory. The way in which this feeling returns upon him is to our minds one of the great beauties of the poem,—it is like the glow of crimson sunset in which Claude baptizes his Italian skies and waters, or of yellow sunset in which Cuyp wraps his feeding cattle.

"What link existed, human or divine, Between the tiny tot six summers old, And yonder life of mine upon the hills

Among the mists and storms ? 'Tis strange 'tis strange ! But when I look'd on Willie's face, it seem'd

That I had known it in some beauteous life That I had left behind me in the north."

"I cannot frame in speech the thoughts that fill'd This grey old brow, the feelings dim and warm That soothed the throbbings of this weary heart !

But when I placed my hand on Willie's head, Warm sunshine tingled from the yellow hair Thro' trembling fingers to may blood within ; And when I look'd in Willie's stainless eyes I saw the empty ether floating grey O'er shadowy mountains murmuring low with winds ; And often when, in his old-fashion'd way, He question'd me I seemed to hear a voice From far away, that mingled with the cries Haunting the regions where the round red sun Is all alone with God among the snow."

No one can know what true poetry is who does not feel its breath in every line of this fine passage. Or take the concluding passage, where he sits with Willie's dog Donald at his feet,—the dog who tried but failed to save the little fellow from the snow, recalling the sad past :—

"There's no need

Of speech between us. Here we dumbly bide, But know each other's sorrow,—and we both Feel weary. When the nights are long and cold, And snow is falling as it falleth now,

And wintry winds are moaning, here I dream Of Willie and the unfamiliar life

I left behind me on the norland hills ! Do doggies gang to heaven?' Willie asled ; And sic! what Solomon of modern days Can answer that? Yet here at nights I sit, Reading the Book, with Donald at my side ; And stooping, with the Book upon my knee, I sometimes gaze in Donald's patient eyes— So sad, so human, though he cannot speak— And think he knows that Willie is at peace, Far far away beyond the norland hills, Beyond the silence of the untrodden snow."

It would be difficult to suggest more than verbal faults in this simple and beautiful poem. And "Poet Andrew," a poem on David Gray and his fate, is scarcely, if at all, inferior to it. There the undertone of passion is the father's bitterness of heart at the estrangement which his son's higher education and dreamy nature introduced between the lad and his parents,—they building castles in the air for his long and respected life as a Scotch Presby- terian minister,—and he, far more than fulfilling, while bitterly dis-

appointing their ambition by early fame and early death as a poet whose few rare poems will live. The father's half-recognition of his son's poetic power, his impatience with it as a man of sense, and yet the subduing force with which the verses touch him, so that their melody insists on mingling with the murmur of his loom, is the ideal background of this beautiful poem. Its key-note is struck in the two beautiful verses prefixed to the poem:—

" 0 Loom ! that loud art murmuring, What doth he hear thee say or sing Thou hummest o'er the dead one's songs,

He cannot choose but hark, His heart with tearful rapture throngs, But all his face grows dark.

"0 cottage Fire ! that burnest bright, What pictures sees he in thy light? A city's smoke, a white, white face, Phantoms that fade and die, And last, the lonely burial-place On the windy hill hard by."

The growth of the estrangement is a picture of true power :— " Weelrthe lad

Grew up among us, and at seventeen His hands were gently white, and he was tall, And slim, and narrow-shoulder'd : pale efface, Silent, and bashful. Then we first began To feel how mnckle more he knew than we, To eye his knowledge in a kind of fear, As folk might look upon a crouching beast, Bonnie, but like enough to rise and bite.

Up came the cloud between us silly folk And the young lad that sat among his Books, Amid the silence of the night ; and oft It pain'd us sore to fancy he would learn Enough to make him look with with shame and scorn

On this old dwelling. 'Twas his manner, Sir!

He seldom lookt his father in the face, And when he walkt about the dwelling, seem'd Like one superior; dumbly he would steal To the burnside, or into Lintlin Woods, With some new-farrant book,—and when I peep'd,

Behold a book of jingling-jangling rhyme,

Fine-written nothings on a printed page ; And, press'd between the leaves, a flower perchance, Anemone or blue Forget-me-not, Pluckt in the grassy loanin'. Then I peep'd Into his drawer, among his papers there, And found—you guess ?—a heap of idle rhymes, Big-sounding, like the worthless printed book : Some in old copies scribbled, some on scraps Of writing paper, others finely writ With spins and flourishes on big white sheets.

I clench'd my teeth, and groan'd. The beauteous dream Of the good Preacher in his brew black dress, With house and income snug, began to fade Before the picture of a drunken loon

Bawling out songs beneath the moon and stars,—

Of poet Willie Clay, who wrote a book About Ring Robert Brace, and aye got fie, And scatter'd stars in verse, and aye got fu',

Wept the world's sins, and then got fn' again,— Of Ferguson, the feckless limb o' law,—

And Robin Barns, who ganged the whisky casks And brake the seventh commandment. So at once I up and said to Andrew, You're a fool!

You waste your time in silly, senseless verse, Lame as your own conceit : take heed! take heed !

Or, like your betters, come to grief ere long !' But Andrew flusht and never spake a word, Yet eyed me sidelong with his beaded een,

And turn'd awa', and, as he turn`d, his look—

Half scorn, half sorrow—stang me. After that, I felt he never heeded word of ours, And tho' we tried to teach him common sense

He idled as he pleased; and many a year,

After I spake him first, that look of his Came dark between us, and I held my tongue, And felt he scorn'd me for the poetry's sake."

Nor is it possible to speak too highly of the beauty of the close, of the death of the young poet, and the emotions left behind in the father's mind.

The other idyls, though some of them of considerable beauty, are very decidedly inferior to these. The "English Huswife's Gossip" is the best,—but there is a clear confusion in it between the kind of weakness proper to a "natural," and that which is so often seen in fine but onesided artists. Here is the true 'natural':—

" Talk of the . . John! and home again so soon ? The children are at school, the dinner o'er, Tom still is busy working at the plough. Weary ?—then sit you down and rest awhile. John fears all strangers—is ashamed to speak— But stares and counts his fingers o'er as now, Yet—trust him !—when you vanish he will tell The colour of your hair, your hat, your clothes, The number of the buttons on your coat— Eh, John ?—he laughs—as sly as sly can be !"

And it is followed up by explaining how weak is his curiosity, how he rips the bellows up to see where the wind comes from, and so forth. But the following is a sort of weakness specifically different :—

" Oft he reminds me of a painter lad

Who came to Inverburn a summer since, Went poking everywhere, with pallid face, Thought, painted, wander'd in the woods alone, Work'd a long morning at a leaf or flower, And got the name of clever. John and he Made friends—a thing I never could make out ; But, bless my life ! it seem'd to me the lad Was just a John who had learnt to read, to write, and paint !"

One often sees men of great genius in one well-marked line, mathe- maticians, artists, and what not, who are weak men, foolish men, what you might call "almost idiots," in other branches of life, but then they never have this animal instinct of childish cun- ning, this peculiar slyness which is not fraud, nor human cunning, nor animal sagacity, but a cunning peculiar to creatures who are not what they ought to be, who are conscious that they stand below the level of their own species, and whose cunning is there- fore half cunning and half shame. There is nothing of this in the mere feebleness of weak men who can do little, but who live in the same general plane of ideas as their neighbours, still less in men who are men of genius in part, and weak only in the remainder of their natures. This poem misses, too, the ideal unity, the imaginative glow in the background of the tale which lights up the two first, and the same may be said still more decidedly of "The Two Babes" and "The Widow Mysie." The former is a little straggling, and a little uncertain in its touch, and the incident on which it tarns, the softening of a father's heart by a baby not his own, has a shade common-place both in conception and execution. "The Widow Mysie " is a vivid painting of a disagreeable character, quite with- out any lyrical element, and, skilful as it is, seeming to want a teller whose depth of nature shall afford some contrast to the pretty, plump, soft, treacherous, little widow who is its theme. "Hugh Sutherland's Pansies" verges on the sentimental, nor can we thoroughly admire the few lyrical poems appended at the conclusion of the volume. There is a certain slight mannerism of feeling and expression about them, an effort to make up for want of real intensity of feeling by reiteration of language. The "London Idyl," published recently in the Fortnightly Review, is a poem of great beauty and power, but the versification is certainly less musical and sweet than that of "Willie Baird" or "Poet Andrew." The careless, clumsy manner of Browning, which purposely leaves things half told, and omits nominatives to verbs in order to add a certain grotesque familiarity to the style, has cast a little shade here and there on a poet moulded in a very different school. Mr. Buchanan has evidently even more fertility of imagina- tion than lyrical sweetness, but without the latter his conceptions are in danger of degenerating into prose. He can give the thrill of all true poetry when he is in the mood. Let him not rest satis- fied with the mere activity of a creative imagination, when he has also the rare power to bathe his pictures in the only -influence which will preserve them from oblivion—that atmosphere of eternal beauty "whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, and the round ocean, and the living air."