"Some sapphire-pinion'd, ruby-winged some,
More bright hued others than the peacock's eyes;
Then golden bees would flit with simmering hum
Found rose and violet, lading their small thighs
With liquid sweet; then filmy-winged flies
And midges forth would swarm, and in wild strife
Blue swallows flash among them, with sharp cries
Of exultation, as all air grew rife

With the soft murmuring glow and stir of insect life."-(Pp. 236-9.)

Here is a battle-picture, one of many: we wonder what our friends of the Peace Society would say to it:

"There are who love upon the harbor shore

To see the ocean's white wrath leap the bar
And hear the baffled monster's painful roar;
There are who love to look upon the war
Of elements in conflict, and the jar
Of thunders bursting on the mountain's side-
Yet is the battle storm sublimer far

When nations meet, and in their armèd pride
The sovereignty of Right by slaughter s steel is tried.
"The blazon'd standards far and wide array'd,

The crash of spears as brazen trumpets blow,
The arm uplifted, and the flashing blade,

The fainting knees, the empty saddle-bow,
The horse hoofs trampling on the cloven brow,
The earth all steep'd with blood as lees with wine,
The groans unheard of mightiest chiefs laid low,
Of heavenly will are hierophantic sign,

The characters are dark yet not the less divine.”—(P. 181.)

A critic would not be true to his craft who did not pick holes. Let us say then that to the aliquando dormitat," Mr. Stigand forms no exception. We may be given to wish that this did not occur

sometimes in the very places where it is least tolerable-as, for instance, in the beautiful episode of King Eric of Denmark and his bride Adelaide; where, in the very opening of the final scene, we have"The ruin'd shell

Of that huge tower was lit in every nook

By light of burning wains; like fiends from hell
The Moslems shouted. Adelaide took

Her lover's hand with an unutterable look."

In a passage of lamentation over the of the first canto, we have another such present state of Syria, near the opening instance:

"And 'neath the Bedawee's destroying spear

The peasant reaps his meagre sheaves of corn,
While still from time to time upon the ear

Are shrieks of massacre and havoc borne
From homeless crowds and orphan'd troops forlorn,
From Christian streets o'erwhelm'd in blood and flame,
Where Moslems still spit on the Cross in scorn,

And the Frank walks the Pharpar's banks in shame,

Since Europe shriv'd those fiends with indignation tame.”—(P. 9).

This line besides labors under the fault Mr. Stigand has a way of dealing with of ambiguity: for "tame" may agree with the abbreviation "e'er" for "ever," which "fiends," or with "Europe." It is evi- | is hardly en règle; for example: dently meant to belong to "indignation.”

"Which then as e'er by force and cunning throve"

"as e'er" meaning "as ever."

Yet e'er his passion, like a down-press'd reed,
Which rises when the blast has hurried by,
Would spring up blithe anew fresh effort to defy."

Here" e'er means "ever," in the sense of ever and anon.
Again, in p. 81:

"Eer that the Christians make League with the Paynim in equality,"

We have noticed these few blemishes, because the Spenserian stanza, more than any other form of English verse, re."—or, as we have some-quires to be faultless, and thoroughly times seen it, even worse, filled in after polished and in hope that Mr. Stithis manner: "The death is recently re-gand, if, as some have believed, this ported by the local papers, at his seat poem is as yet incomplete, may in its in Pembrokeshire, of a malignant fever concluding cantos exercise a still severer after a very short illness, of discipline over his versification and diction."

"Whose doctrine is the Koràn (sic) and the sumed before the public a character

"And this on the Koran swear wholly to ful-cliffe does not aim at being accounted

There breathes a charm though she is sleeves, and that not in legible embroi

The preacher, after his evening sermon, has been declaring to his people. He is soliloquizes in a strain of self-accusation, no hypocrite; no castaway: he strives in that he does not, in his own heart of to love and to obey: he is an earnest hearts, feel, and live upon, the truths he searcher for truth:

"If it be sin, forgive me: I am bold,

My God, but I would rather touch the ark
To find if thou be there than-thinking hushed
"Tis better to believe, I will believe,

Though, were't not for belief, 'tis far from proved’—
Shout with the people 'Lo our God is there,'

And stun my doubts by iterating faith."--(P. 11.)

How came he, then, to say things that will not bear the test of his own inward questionings? As for instance:

"Take to-night

I preached a careful sermon, gravely planned,
All of it written. Not a line was meant
To fit the mood of any differing

From my own judgment: not the less I find-
(I thought of it coming home while my good Jaue
Talked of the Shetland pony I must get

For the boys to learn to ride :) yes here it is,
And here again on this page-blame by rote,
Where by my private judgment I blame not.

We think our own thoughts on this day,' I said,
'Harms it may be, kindly even, still

Not Heaven's thoughts-not Sunday thoughts I'll say.'
Well now do I, now that I think of it,

Advise a separation of our thoughts

By Sundays and by week-days, Heaven's and ours?

By no means, for I think the bar is bad.

I'll teach my children Keep all thinkings pure,

And think them when you like, if but the time

Is free to any thinking. Think of God

So often that in anything you do

It cannot seem you have forgotten Him,

Just as you would not have forgotten us,

Your mother and myself, although your thoughts

Were not distinctly on us, while you played;

And, if you do this, in the Sunday's rest
You will most naturally think of Him;

Just as your thoughts, though in a different way,
(God being the great mystery He is

And so far from us and strangely so near),
Would on your mother's birthday-holiday
Come often back to her.' But I'd not urge

A treadmill Sunday labor for their mind,

Constant on one forced round: nor should I blame
Their constant chatter upon daily themes.

I did not blame Jane for her project told,
Though she had heard my sermon, and no doubt
Ought, as I told my flock, to dwell on that.

Then here again ‘the pleasures of the world
That tempt the younger members of my flock.'
Now I think really that they've not enough
Of these same pleasures. Gray and joyless lives

A many of them have, whom I would see

Sharing the natural gayeties of youth.

I wish they'd more temptations of the kind. "-(Pp. 11-13.)

His own account of this is:

"Twas just this,

That there are lessons and rebukes long made

So much a thing of course that, unobserving,
One sets them down as one puts dots to i's,
Crosses to t's."—(Pp. 13-14.)

This self-questioning is pursued in really
a wonderful manner: especially so, if
we reflect that it is not the preacher, but
a woman who is personating the speaker.
Still we may be forgiven, amid all that
is admirable in the poem, for saying that
it would have been more generally felt
to convey that which in our day thou-
sands of clergy and laity feel, if it had
been simpler, more plainly thought, and
more plainly expressed. Take but one
trifling example, the words "thinking
hushed," in our first-quoted passage.
On first reading, we are put into doubt
which of three meanings they represent
whether-

1. " Thinking (substantive) being hushed; 2. "Thinking (participle) that the following saying is hushed; or,

3. (which eventually asserts itself to be the meaning) "thinking (participle) in a hushed or silent manner within one's self."

And of these difficulties this and the other poems are full: obscurities worth

clearing up, depths worth fathomingbut which need not have been obscurities, and seem to have been hidden away in the deeps merely from the habit or the love of hiding away. There is also to blame in this the old story, "Brevis esse laboro; obscurus fio."

But at all events, in the principal poem in the volume, "Sister Annunciata," Mrs. Webster has been guiltless of this study of brevity. However the fault may sometimes appear in single sentences, the whole poem, in which a nun, once in love, alternately recalls former days and bewails her sin in recalling them, and is lectured by the good abbess on her lot, throughout seventy-one pages, cannot be found fault with for being too short. It is impossible that Mrs. Webster could handle such a theme without giving us striking and noble passages, and laying open sources of conflicting thought and feeling. Take for instance the following: and there are many more such:

"Alas!

Even if I would, how could I now recall
To their long-faded forms those phantasies
Of a far, other, consciousness which now
Beneath the ashes of their former selves
Lie a dead part of me, but still a part,
Oh evermore a part.

"I do not think

There can be sin in that, in knowing it.

I am not nursing the old foolish love

Which clogged my spirit in those bitter days.

Ah no, dear as it was even in its pain,

I have trampled on it, crushed its last life out.

I do not dread the beautiful serpent now;

It cannot breathe again, not if I tried

To warm it at my breast, it is too dead

And my heart has grown too cold. The Lord himself,

I thank Him, has renewed it virgin-cold

To give to Him. I do but recognize

A simple truth, that that which has been lived,

Lived down to the deeps of the true being, is
Even when past for ever, has become

Inseparable from the life-long self:

But yet it lives not with the present life.

So, in this wise, I may unshamed perceive

That the dead life, that the dead love, are still

A part of me."—(Pp. 48-9.)

Still we cannot help feeling that here | satis!" and refiect whether the work of again the process has been overdone. art would not have been more perfect by Again and again we cry, "Ohe! jam the loss of one half of its present material.