Because the world is mad! You cannot count
That you should weep for this account, not you!
You weep for what you know.
Sick in a fever, if you touch him once,

A red-haired child,

Though but so little as with a finger tip,
Will set you weeping; but a million sick-
You could as soon weep for the rule of three,
Or compound fractions.
Uncomprehended by you, must remain
Uninfluenced by you. Women as you are,
Mere women, personal and passionate,

Therefore this same world,

You give us doating mothers and chaste wives,
Sublime Madonnas, and enduring saints,
We get no Christ from you; and verily,
We shall not get a poet, in my mind.’

In reply, Aurora, while she reverences duly the freedom of this generous theorist from personal aims, replies that his work is not the kind for her he is married already to his social experiment— she too has a vocation. Men are greater than any of their prosperities. The evil lies deeper than he thinks. The artist is still needed to keep up the open roads between the seen and unseen.

'A starved man

Exceeds a fat beast: we'll not barter, sir,
The beautiful for barley. And, even so,
I hold you will not compass your poor ends
Of barley-feeding and material ease,
Without a poet's individualism

To work your universal. It takes a soul
To move a body; it takes a high-soul'd man
To move the masses-even to a cleaner stye.
It takes the ideal to blow a hair's breadth off

The dust of the actual. Ah, your Fouriers failed,
Because not poets enough to understand
That life develops from within.'

So Romney Leigh acknowledges at last, and learns patience, and ceases toiling to carve the world anew after a 'pattern on his nail,' and vexing his soul to abolish inequalities, and somehow serve out

to every man perfect virtue, and all sorts of comforts, 'gratuitously, with the soup at six.' He says in the end—

'Oh, cousin, let us be content, in work,
To do the thing we can, and not presume
To fret because it's little. "Twill employ
Seven men, they say, to make a perfect pin :
Who makes the head, content to miss the point;
Who makes the point, agreed to leave the join;
And if a man should cry, 'I want a pin,
And I must make it straightway, head and point,'
His wisdom is not worth the pin he wants.
Seven men to a pin-and not a man too much!
Seven generations, haply, to this world,

To right it visibly, a finger's breadth,
And mend its rents a little.'

This is sound philosophy-and the poem has many such wise and large-minded thoughts, vigorously expressed in felicitous and glowing language. Our generation scarcely numbers more than one or two among its master-minds from whom we could have looked for a production at all to rival this in comprehensiveness—a poem with so much genuine depth, and so free from obscurity. The results of abstract thinking are here, and yet there is no heavy philosophising of set purpose. A warm human life meets us everywhere. There are no broad levels of prosaic reflection, such as sometimes test the patience even of true Wordsworthians. Men and women are introduced who learn philosophy by actual life, instead of those fair but hazy phantoms which allure and disappoint us in many of the philosophical poems of Schiller. Very difficult is the task undertaken. To have succeeded so well is high praise. Some years ago the same writer would certainly have failed in great measure.

The poem contains many descriptive passages of great power or beauty, such for example as the sketches of English rural scenery as compared with the Italian-sunset in London-the scene in the church on the day of Romney's wedding the fall of Leigh Hall, and others. The love of Marian for her child is rendered with a

force and pathos that will come home to many mothers' hearts. The flight of a girl whose depraved mother would have sold her to the squire, is thus vigorously painted

'The child turned round,

And looked up piteous in the mother's face,
(Be sure that mother's deathbed will not want
Another devil to damn, than such a look.)

'Oh, mother!' then, with desperate glance to heaven,
'God, free me from my mother !' she shrieked out,
'These mothers are too dreadful.' And, with force
As passionate as fear, she tore her hands

Like lilies from the rocks, from hers and his,

And sprang down, bounded headlong down the steep,
Away from both-away, if possible,

She heard them yell.
from the hills,

And now she had cast
On. Mad fear

As far as God-away! They yelled at her,
As famished hounds at a hare.
She felt her name hiss after her
Like shot from guns. On, on.
The voices off with the uplands.
Was running in her feet and killing the ground;
The white roads curled as if she burnt them up,
The green fields melted, wayside trees fell back

To make room for her. Then, her head grew vexed-
Trees, fields, turned on her, and ran after her ;

She heard the quick pants of the hills behind,

Their keen air pricked her neck. She had lost her feet,
Could run no more, yet, somehow, went as fast—

The horizon, red 'twixt steeples in the east,
So sucked her forward, forward, while her heart
Kept swelling, swelling, till it swelled so big

It seemed to fill her body; then it burst,

And overflowed the world, and swamped the light.

'And now I am dead and safe,' thought Marian Erle—

She had dropped-she had fainted.'

If the plot of this tale had been developed in a prose fiction, some objections might have been urged on the score of probability. But we are not sure that the demand should be pressed so rigorously on a poem. The speeches uttered in the dialogues are sometimes so

long as to lose almost wholly the conversational character, and yet it cannot be denied that they are in spirit dramatic, inasmuch as each is made to arise out of what had gone before, and is such as belongs to the character who gives it utterance. The story of many poems is simply a slender thread on which to hang imagery, descriptions, and reflection, and is encumbered out of all measure by its adornments. In this instance the story itself (as in the poems of Scott) assumes a prominent interest, and while all mere ornament is subordinated, is told clearly and well, yet so imaginatively that the reader can never think to himself- All this would have been better said in prose.'

'Craigcrook Castle.'

MR. MASSEY'S first volume of poems was received with general favour by the critics; and this, his second, gives abundant evidence that their auguries were not fallacious as regards the reality of his genius, nor their praise in any way injurious to its culture. We shall proceed to give an account of this little book, believing some information as to its contents more likely than a few sentences of general criticism to induce our readers to make acquaintance with it for themselves. First of all, there is a description of Craigcrook Castle, with its tiny town of towers,' its famous roses, and the region round about. To these roses, by the way, certain stanzas are addressed farther on, whose only fault is one which it would be scarcely fair to lay at Mr. Massey's door. Lovely are the roses: graceful are the verses; but what art could make 'Craigcrook' sound pleasantly in song? The recurrence of that word in every stanza is as the grating of a coffee-mill amidst sweet harping. There are some vigorous passages in the description of the guests at the Castle, their employments, and how they agree to sing or say, in turn, each somewhat that shall crown the glorious summer-day they celebrate.

The first poem, entitled 'The Mother's Idol broken,' consists of occasional pieces suggested by the death of a child. Very touching

are some of these ejaculations and laments-these yearning, wistful cries after the lost little one- -these echoes of the dear child-life, now silent in the grave. Many thoughts and lines here are diviningrods that find out the hidden spring of tears, and make us look heavenward, whither some precious one hath gone before. The following passages, for example, are so beautiful, because so true-no poetic expression or vesture, merely-but drawn from the depths of our common humanity.

Again :

'This is a curl of our poor 'Splendid's' hair!
A sunny burst of rare and ripe young gold-
A ring of sinless gold that weds two worlds!'

'There is her nest where in beauty smiled

Our babe, as we leaned above;

And her pleading face asked for the tenderest place
In all our world of love.

Very silent and empty now! yet we feel

It rock; and a tiny footfall

Comes over the floor in the thrilling night-hush,
And our hearts leap up for the call

Of our puir wee lammie dead and gone;

Our bonnie wee lammie dead and gone.'

We have not space for more quotation from this part of the book, but we are much mistaken if there are not many who will prefer it to all the rest. We have seen those who seldom read a line of poetry, and to whom 'Balder' seemed a prophecy in a tongue uninterpreted, who were melted by the pathos of Mr. Dobell's England in Time of War.' So while the lovers of poetry and the students of art rejoice in the 'Bridegroom of Beauty,' or such a poem as 'Only a Dream,' the mother will turn to the plaintive utterances of bereavement, and feel that her grief has found words. And what truer test or higher tribute could either poet seek or find? For what is Poetry but Truth with her singing-robes about her?

Next follows 'Lady Laura,' a tale in short cantos of various measure, wherein the lady, cast out by falsehood from her broad