MR. MO RTLIIER COLLINS'S P OE MS.*

MARTIAL, if we remember right, somewhere expresses himself satisfied with the remark of a disparaging critic who had con- temptuously observed that there were some good things in his book. We doubt whether it will be equally easy to please Mr. Collins, though so much we, who have indeed no desire to be dis- paraging, can say with all heartiness and sincerity. There are, indeed, among his "Poems" some pieces BO good both in thought and expression that they cannot be accounted for by any acci- dental felicity of the common literary faculty, that they make us sure that their author deserves to be placed on the right side of the line—a vague, and yet a very real, distinction—which separates the poet from the writer of poetical verse. Writers of poetical verse are indeed in this age of wide-spread culture a numerous .class; they come before us in embarrassing numbers ; we never know what to say to them ; they are too meritorious to be con- temptuously dismissed ; the only thing they want is what it is quite useless to prescribe to them,—inspiration. Mr. Collins evi- dently belongs to the higher class ; if he were always determined to be worthy of his gifts, he might take good rank in it. We are anxious that the reader should have at once a specimen of him, in his happiest mood, and accordingly quote part of "The Ivory Gate ":—

" TOE IVORY GATE.

"Stint gemlnae Somni portae : quart= altera fertur Cornea; qua veris tactile datur °altos umbris: Altera eandenti perfects. nitens elephanto; Sad falsa ad eaelum mittunt insomnia Manes.—VIRGIL.

• The Inn of Strange Meetings, and other Poem& By Mortimer Collins. London: floury S. King and Co. 1871.

"When, loved by poet and painter The sunrise fills the sky, When night's gold urns grow fainter,

And in depths of amber die—

When the morn-breeze stirs the curtain,

Bearing an odorous freight—

Then visions strange, uncertain, Pour thick through the Ivory Gate.

"Then the oars of Ithaca dip so Silently into the sea

That they wake not sad Calypso—

And the Hero wanders free ; He breasts the ocean-furrows, At war with the words of Fate— And the blue tide's low susurras Comes up to the Ivory Gate.

IlL

"Or, clad in the hide of leopard, 'Mid Ida's freshest dews, Paris, the Teucrian shepherd, His sweet (Enone 'wore:

On the thought of her coming bridal Unuttered joy doth wait—

While the time of the false one's idyl Rings soft through the Ivory Gate.

"AI. the vision of dawn is leisure—

But the truth of day is toil :

And we pass from dreams of pleasure

To the world's unstayed turmoil. Perchance, beyond the river

Which guards the realms of Fate, Our spirits may dwell for ever '3Iong dreams of the Ivory Gate."

The first half of the second stanza strikes us as singularly good ; there is a positive inspiration about the very rhymes, and the con- cluding stanza is very sweet and graceful. And there are others of the short poems, and, here and there, passages in the longer ones, which are nearly if not quite up to this level of merit. To those we shall take occasion to return. Meanwhile, we have a word or two of advice for Mr. Coffins. There will be nothing novel or striking about it, it will only be another version of what critics have been preaching ever since there have been critics— the need that there is in poetry, as in all other human work, whether high or low, whether the work of the few or of the many, of a solid foundation of labour, downright honest hard work. It has been said by a great poet whom we need not name, speaking of his own ways of composing, "thousands of good lines fly up the chimney." We imagine that Mr. Collins does not let good lines fly up his chimney. He seems to put them down, good and, must we say it? bad, as they come from his brain, and commit them to unalterable print. It must be sheer carelessness or disinclination to labour in a writer who shows on occasion such taste and such skill in versifying to allow such rhymes as " bodiced" and "modest," "bodice and goddess" (Mr. Collins is remarkably fond of this word " bodice" and its deriva- tives,—" stays" would be a more tractable word for the purposes of verse), "patrician" and " elysian," " cadence" and "maidens," and to admit such a word as " worrit " at all. Our author is too much inclined, we fancy, to spend his strength on verse of the "troubadour" kind, and does not think it worth while to make this quite perfect, and without being perfect, it has not, we take it, any raison d'itre. In the "Inn of Strange Meetings" we have, however, a more ambitious effort. We take this " Inn" to mean the imagination, and very likely are wrong,—we wish indeed that the poets of the day, who are very much given to allegories, would remember that it is very much easier to tie a knot than to untie it. The poem opens well, and the old inn is capitally described :—

" A curious Gothic building, many-angled,

With carven cloisters in a delicate row, By flowering creepers hidden and entangled :

Stands the stout landlord in the portico, Full of grave humour, costumed in old-fangled

Jerkin and hose. His visage has the glow That like an altar-flame is wont to flicker About the priesthood of the god of liquor."

So are the serving-man and the chambermaid, in whom the hero recognises the nurse of days long past, but when we come to how a flower or something turns into his grandmother, a beautiful young lady three inches high, we are fairly lost. We seem to get back to the rational for a while with the apparition, even though it be a ghost of old Sir Guy, the crusading "founder of his race," but Helen and the marriage scene, which, we may be pardoned for saying, is described with quite as much glow as is desirable, we are obliged to class with the incomprehensible. We are less disposed to account for this by our dullness when we see now and then a passage wherein the poet is manifestly laughing at his readers. "Let me read Greek," he says, "to see if Pam awake," and we have a stanza about the Greek poets and two more about Hermes, adapted from the Homeric Hymns. All this can have no connection with the poem; it is put in out of sheer gaiete de cceur, an impulse by which Mr. Collins too often permits himself to be carried away. It is a pity thatso much power should have been expended, for there are excellent passages in it, on a poem which we cannot but call vague and inconsequent. A far happier effort is "A Poet's Philosophy," in which a refined, intel- lectual, and not unspiritual epicureanism is set forth in excellently sympathetic verse, not quite unworthy of Keats. Of Keats, indeed, Mr. Collins frequently reminds us, by his power of pictur- ing an enjoyment of nature which is sensuous rather than imagina- tive, an enjoyment of its foregrounds rather than its landscapes, and dwelling with especial fervour on its colours and greenery, on its scents and sounds. Here are some stanzas which we have no doubt about all readers admiring. They follow the motto,— " 'We are such stuff As dreams are made on, and our little life Is rounded with a sleep.'

"Dew on the lawns, and fragrance of fresh flowers,

And magical song of mellow-throatod birds—

A beauty untransmutable to words : Such is the vision of the morning hours ; When fade the urns of night in saffron skies, And light and love return to young dream-haunted eyes,

"Banns has sucked the breath of Spring—

And I have touched thy lips, Earine, What time the Dawn came from the purple sea, And forests fluttered to the waving wing Of the nnwearying Angel who doth sweep Back upon heavy hinge the porphyry gates of Sleep.

"Delicious thus to enter Morning Land : The world is wondrous, for the world is new ; Dim drosera is all o'erdrenched with dew.

Ah, well might Merlin wake in Broceliande, And see the daybreak through the oaks that wave Where ivy and violet grow on his melodious grave!

"Will it be thus when the strange sleep of death Lifts from the brow, and lost eyes live again ? Will Morning dawn on the bewildered brain To cool and heal ? And shall I feel the breath Of freshening winds that travel from the sea, And meet thy loving laughing eyes, Earine ?"

The pen that could write this is capable of more than common things, and should never descend to them. This is the feeling with which we have written, and Mr. Collins must remember this, if he is disposed to think anything that we have said too harsh.