POETRY. — The Son of She/math. By L. M. Thornton. (Began Paul,

Trench, and Co.)—Shelomith is a Hebrew woman, married to an Egyptian prince, who perishes in the overthrow in the Red Sea. Her son is the hero of this drama. His courage, wisdom, loftiness of soul, and purity of purpose stand out in striking contrast to the fickleness, turbulence, and meanness of the-Israelites in whose Camp he is a sojourner. To point this contrast, and generally, to pat the matter quite plainly, to make the reader realise that the worship of Jehovah was a cruel and degrading superstition, seems to have been one of .the "motives of his own taste and convenience" which actuated the author in composing this drama. There can be no mistaking the purpose of the following :— "mine be the glory, Lord !

Thine is the high command, Thine, not oars, the slaughtering sword And the red and ruthless hand.

For human hearts are frail and weak And flinch with p.ty and faint with toil, The hand would scanty vengeance wreak. The eye be sick at the curdled soil, Were not the fire of Thy wrath A lamp in our terrible path, Did not the might of Thy word s.lway Kindle the soft and rouse the slow To smite by night, and smite by day. And spurn the pangs of the dying foe."

The controversy is an old one which we do not care to renew ; but it is a fatal mistake to make it the motive of a work -of art. Mr. Thornton's choral odes are not of high quality ; the extract given represents them fairly well. The blank verse rises to a higher level. It is modulated with skill, and not unfrequently Teaches a force and dignity worthy of its subject. The dedication to the drama is written in Latin hexameters, a metre in which Mr. Thornton certainly does not excel. The last line, e.g., where we look for something very noble in sound, is sadly weak :— " Coal= esse, ease diem, solisgne ivies et &tandem."

"Abdita lumine nostro " can hardly mean, as it should, "hidden from our eyes ;" and "renovabile" is not a Latin word.—The More Eacel1ent Way. (Maeaullan.)—The speaker in this poem utters a long soliloquy, in which he meditates on the problems of existence. The soliloquy is interrupted by a vision, and the vision, again, is in- terpreted by an angel whose teaching is summed up in the stanza :—

" But, as I said, I spoke not of my creed ;

The vision that appeared to thee said not

' Believe ' • but ` Do ' ; and in this word I read

That blessed faith is not to be my lot, But only the salvation to be got . By charity—salvation from the hell Of Thought's oonsismiog fire; and therefore what The vision taught thee I was sent to tell, And now, my son, adjure thee to obey. Farewell."

And on this advice the speaker acts. All this is put in .the most difficult metrical form which a young versifier's ambition can attempt, the Spenserian stanza. The author of this volume is manifestly un- able to manage it. If our readers wish to be satisfied of this, let them take another stanza :—

" 0 Death, beneath this lonely moon-lit sky, The thought of thee lets loose an agony : Thou mystery within a mystery,

The darkness of the dark infinity Is darkened darker by thy darkness; thy Terrific spirit broods upon the deep, And shades the shadows of uncertainty Beneath the shadow of thy wings, that weep

Me to the awful certainty of unknown sleep."

If the necessary rhymes cannot be made out except by such violent dislocations as those which we have italicised, surely it were better to try something simpler. The thought of the poem does not seem to us to rise above the ordinary level of prose.—Summer Dreams. By Henry Rose. (W. Isbister.)—Mr. Rose has a certain gift for description of nature. Some of his landscapes and foregrounds in the series of poems which follows the prelude of "The Mill" are executed with feeling and skill. But his metrical power is deficient ; and we cannot make out that in his tales or his reflections he has anything very striking to say.—The Lay of the Lady Ida : and other Poems. By J. J. Britton. (Remington.)—Mr. Britton has studied Mr. Tennyson's verse with much care, we should say, and not without some good result. Here is a sample :—

"The fountains in the court Leapt up from marble bowls to greet the sun And, at their height, paused, broke, and breaking, fell Like to a life's high yearnings and their fall: A peacock on the broad smooth terrace steps Spread proudly all his wealth of gold and green: Pages were loitering in n corner's shade Chett'ng belike of kisses lately snatched From waiting women of the princess' train, And last. the princess' silf, encircle' round With some of these, came over the smooth sward, Paused by the fountains, entered th n the house. 'She comes the painter thought, • and always takes This road, the longest, to her inmost bower, Some hope in that—small hope, it snob it be. Yet, what am I to have an mach P pence, peace.' Then, as the Silken rustle filled the door,

He bent his lowest, courtliest bow."

The resemblance in lines three and four to "And like a broken par-. pose waste in air," is a little too marked. But Mr. Britton has much yet to learn from his master, whom he certainly will not And using such a pause as this :—

"And in the day a faicinetion draws Me ever to that gallery."

The story is of a painter who loves a maiden of a princely house, and when doomed to die for his presumption is found to be himself the long-missing heir. It is told with some skill and command of language. The long ballad poem, too, "Bertha," shows considerable power of execution. Mr. Britton makes progress in his art ; and if he will remember that he has as yet got but a little way, he may yet do well.