PHASES.

ONE night I saw the moon, when she was full,
Shine in the dark'ning east; she seemed to me
Full of calm joy to be unto the world
A witness of his life whose kingly orb
I had seen die. She taught me faith that night,
For his fire glittering on her silver world,
Told man was not forsaken. Once again
I saw her, with her edge breaking in foam
Against the sky; then, as a line of light,
Waning away. 'Twas then that other thoughts
She whispered. On the phases of my life
I mused, and listened to the distant tread
Of hopes and thoughts passed by, and won-

dered how

wise,

What seemed a kingdom once was now a dream,
Scarce worthy of a sigh. I thought of years
When image after image in my brain
Reigned as supreme, claiming allegiance
Almost as idols there: how first one filled
The temple of my heart and coloured all,
Until the wheel of time, experience fraught,
Gave me a new, strange joy, which faded too.
And yet each seemed as though it could not die,
The daisy of the child, the rose of youth.
Nor truly do such die if they have sown
Their spirit-seeds not if hearts grew more
Thoughts purer and love higher; if each phase,
Which cast its silvery light across our way,
Throwing black shadows of fantastic form,
Or rising with red glory through the fogs
Of the low valleys, showed an onward path-
A track, still winding upwards into light,
The cloudless daylight of our Father's home.
If we have learned that every happiness
Was but a waning splendour, cold and dim,
To the perfected sunshine of God's love,
And in that love have found our lasting rest,
So shall our waning moons, lit by the Sun
Of Righteousness above, be orbs of Heaven.

EVEN-TIDE.

-

LORD! I acknowledge Thee in this thick cloud,
Although I cannot see Thee! It may be
The glory of Thy face would dazzle me,
If that surpassing brightness were allowed.

In tender mercy dost Thou visit me
At evening, when Thy gentle dew descends:
Sometimes, in loving voices of my friends;
Sometimes, in visions of eternity.

I could not climb the mountains of Thy love,
But in the valleys do Thy rivers flow;
The bitter.herbs beside those waters grow,
And lo! they teem with sweetness from above.
Hold Thou my hand, my Father, I am weak;
Hush me to sleep, for I am sore afraid :
Yet, as Thy child, I should be undismayed;
For in the silence I should hear Thee speak!

* The half moon as seen through a telescope.

I will not trust my thoughts, which trouble me
I will not answer all that they would say;
I cast my cares and my regrets away,
And leave my spirit all alone with Thee!

From the London Review,

ALEXANDER SMITH.

In the year 1853 the public were startled by hearing that a new poet had suddenly arisen. Selections from his poetry were given in one of the literary journals of the day, and by-and-by the poem itself, from which they were taken, was duly published. Perhaps no volume of poems ever excited so much attention as the "Life Drama." Critics for once were fairly enthusiastic. Newspapers and reviews rang with praises of the new poet. And now, looking back at the "Life Drama" over the space of fourteen years, when the judgment has become more sobered, and the warm enthusiasm of youth chilled, we are scarcely surprised at the reception which this remarkable poem especially when the writer's age and circumstances are considered-excited. It literally teems with images. Lines of extraordinary beauty, and pas sages showing the deepest sympathy with Nature in all her various manifestations, are met. And the excitement was not lessened when the public learnt that the poem was the production of a young Scotch patterndrawer, who had lived nearly all his life in Glasgow and Paisley, and had only now and then enjoyed rare glimpses of the country scenes and country pleasures which he so delighted to sing. Mr. Smith was, we believe, born in the year 1831, at Kilmarnock. His parents intended him to be a minister of the United Presbyterian Church. Family circumstances, however, prevented this wish being fulfilled. Mr. Smith, like so many Oxford and Cambridge men of the present day, instead of entering the Church, In the finally betook himself to literature. meanwhile, however, he occupied himself with pattern-drawing for Scotch manufac tures.

During this period the "Life Drama" appeared, and fairly took the world by storm. No period, however, especially in Scotland, could have been more disastrous to the development of true poetic growth. The Rev. George Gilfillan, of whom it has been said that he considered himself a great painter, because he painted with a big brush, was at that time throughout the North omnipotent as a critic. The minis

"An empire's fall was less in his regard
Than sunshine pouring from the rifted clouds
On an old roof-tree furred with emerald moss;
A wide, gray, windy sea bespecked with foam;
A ship beneath bare poles against the rain;
Or thunder steeping all the sunny waste
In ominous light."

"Still as a lichened stone I lay, and watched
The lights and shadows on the landscape's
face,

The moving cloud that quenched the shining
fields,

The gliding sunbeam, the gray trailing shower,
And all the commerce of the earth and sky."

ters of the Free and Established Kirks each | touches, describing Nature, have seldom Sunday vied with each other who could been surpassed. Mr. Smith here at last preach the most extravagant rhetoric. The realized the crowning condition of art in perfervidum ingenium Scotorum had fairly descriptive passages, that it must be by. broken loose. All these circumstances must one stroke that the scene is made visible, be weighed when considering the "Life just as, by a single blow, the die gives form Drama." Its faults were those of the day, to the shapeless gold, and makes it for ever and especially of the country; but its pass current as genuine coin. Here, for merits were its own. Mr. Smith had con- instance, is a passage from "Horton," which sequently to run the gauntlet, not merely of is as clear and distinct as a photograph:friends, but of foes. On one side he encountered sarcasm, and on the other was loaded with still more pernicious flattery. These were the only two kinds of criticism which he, as a rule, received, the worst that can be for a poet. As he has said to us, his friendly critics did him the most harm. The old maxim, "Qui ne sait se borner, ne sait jamais écrire," the foundation of all true writing, Here each line brings before us a vivid picwas forgotten in Scotland. The great intellectual feat ture, Again, to take another description, was to pour forth all your thunder unre- from a "Boy's Poem," of what is always so strained. No wonder that in such a school difficult to paint-cloud scenery: Mr. Smith's poetry should suffer. Still, making all possible deductions, the "Life Drama" remains distinct from all other poems of the day, remarkable for a wealth of imagery and a certain curiosa felicitas which, in places, remind us of some of the Elizabethan poets, especially of one who is now far too much forgotten, Cyril Tourneur. Of the outward events of Mr. Smith's Here, too, the scene is painted in with a life there is not much to record. The hap- few firm strokes, which show the growth of piest nations have, it has been noticed, the the poet's mind, and his freer mastery over briefest histories. So also with men. Mr. the language. Four years after the "City Smith's appointment as secretary to the Poems came "Edwin of Deira." It will University of Edinburgh, his marriage, his probably never be so popular as the former; vacation tours, one of which he so beauti- but is, in our opinion, on the whole, the fully described in his "Summer in Skye," finest of all Mr. Smith's poems. are among the few outward facts which a in the first place, fewer of those vitia splenbiographer has to tell. Mr. Smith's career, dida, conceits the surest sign of increase in short, is marked by his works. They of power. Ornament is more often rereally form the annals of his life. His placed by thought. The charm of simplicinext venture was written conjointly with ty, which is so wanting in the "Life Drama," his friend, Mr. Dobell. All England was has been in a greater degree attained. then deeply moved with the disasters of "Edwin of Deira" we repeat, as it is the the Crimean war. Mr. Smith, too, felt last, is also decidedly the greatest of Mr. the spirit of the moment, and its result was Smith's poems. Here, however, we must seen in "Sonnets of the War," published leave the poems, and glance at the prose in 1855. But the war spirit was only tem- works. Mr. Smith was a most facile writer, porary. The real theme for the poet in pouring forth contributions, both with his these days is not the victories of war, but of name and without, to reviews and newspapeace. A new chivalry is rising. And pers. His first essay, as far as we know, this Mr. Smith seems to have felt in his was published in the "Edinburgh Essays, next production, "City Poems," published and was upon "Scottish Ballads." As might two years afterwards. In many respects be expected, it was more remarkable for its this little volume shows a great advance. sympathy with the theme than for its analyt We find in it not only the old beauties that ical power. But good criticism was not in charmed so many in the "Life Drama". places wanting. Thus, upon the lines in the old love for the sea and stars and green the ballad of "Cockburn of Henderfields but a loftier tone. Some of the land: ".

There are,

19

4

2

C

"I took his body on my back,

And whiles I gaed and whiles I sat,
I digged a grave, and laid him in,
And happed him with the sod so green."

379

Early circumstances, to a very great extent, with a poetic and susceptible temperament, mould the poet's future destiny. Amongst Mr. Smith's other prose works we must not forget "A Summer in Skye," published in the latter half of 1865. It, too, like his poems, is marked by a photographic power of describing scenery. But there was something more than this power visible. Take, for instance, the opening sentence, describing summer in Edinburgh:

Mr. Smith well writes of the word "happed: -"Can the English reader catch the strange tenderness and pathos of the verb happed'? It is one of the dearest to the Scottish ear, recalling infancy and the thousand instances of the love of a mother's heart, and the unwearied care of a mother's "The air is still and hot above the houses, hand. 'Happed' is the nursery word in Scotland, expressing the care with which but every now and then a breath of east the bed-clothes are laid upon the little forms, wind startles you through the warm sunand carefully tucked in about the round shine- like a sudden sarcasm felt through sleeping cheeks. What an expression it a strain of flattery." That last sentence gives in the verses quoted above to the bur- possesses something far above the mere den and agony of fondness, all wasted and power of verbal photography, as seen in lavished on unheeding clay." Now, such the writings of the two Kingsleys. Still eriticism is not merely delicate, as showing more recently, in " Alfred Hagart's Housethe texture of the critic's mind, but valuable. hold," Mr. Smith broke new ground. Here Nobody who has paid attention to the dic- he seems to have found a vein which seemed tion of Shakespeare and Milton, and in our to promise him both profit and fame. But own days to Tennyson, can fail to see how all our hopes are now buried with him in they have treasured up certain happy words, not generally in common use, by which they are able, as it were, to light up a whole verse with an unexpected glow of feeling and tenderness. But the best criticism in the "Scottish Ballads" is that contained in the concluding pages, where Mr. Smith urges how unprofitable all imitation, from the very fact that it is an imitation, must necessarily be. To the public, the best known of Mr. Smith's essays are those contained in a volume called "Dreamthorp," published in 1863. They smack of the country, and are really more poetical than Mr. Smith's poems. It is easy to say they are idyllic, and do not show sufficient knowledge of the world. But this is like finding fault with sugar because it is not salt. Those who want knowledge of the world must turn somewhere else. This is a book fitted for an arbour, and not a statesman's study. It is filled not with the lore of the schools or the wisdom of the market, but its pages are sweet with the perfume of flowers, and resonant with the songs of birds. So, in the same way, when critics reproach Mr. Smith's other writings with a lack of scholarship, knowledge of men and society, there is but the answer of Poe to be made:

Hath dwelt, and he were I,

He might not sing so wildly well
A mortal melody;

While a bolder note than his might swell
From my lyre within the sky."

the grave. After a short illness, brought
on originally by an attack of diphtheria, he
died on the morning of January 5th, at
Wardie, near Edinburgh. Looking back
his poems,
upon his works, and especially on
we cannot believe that they will altogether
perish. Selections from them are sure to
delight the scholar and the poet in every
future age, and so with certainty we may
write the words of Callimachus in their
fullest sense over his early grave-
Swovon undóves.

Teat

From the Saturday Review. SMALL TALK.

IT has been observed, with a good deal of truth, that all young Englishmen look profoundly unhappy when they are dancing. If Cicero had seen them, he would have thought twice before committing himself to the proposition Nemo saltat sobrius. In this it is their proud privilege to present a remarkable contrast to foreigners, who never seem more frivolous and lighthearted than when they are engaged in self-rotation. Englishmen at such times are generally pictures either of stern resolution or else of severe mental exercise, and go round and round with the sobriety of judges. Nor is it very unnatural that they should. Taking one thing with another, it is probable that a ball is the occasion of more intellectual effort than any other species of recreation known to the human race. Whist is believed to be an intellectual employment worthy of a statesman; but

be made. Without pretending to the discovery of the philosopher's stone, it may not be impossible to throw out a few suggestions which might be the means of promoting social ease and cheerfulness among a class of one's fellowcreatures who seem to need it so much.

no occupation can really be said to task the mental powers of an educated man which does not necessitate the manufacture of conversation. Cricket, billiards, whist, tennis, and even croquet, are simple and commonplace arts in comparison. None of them require small talk, and some of them actually discourage it. But One obvious idea, which doubtless occurs dancing successively with a dozen young crea- repeatedly to reflective minds, is the idea of tures, at the price of inventing for their investi- riddles. The Sphinx would have made a firstgation a dozen different subjects of feminine rate partner. Young ladies like riddles, and if interest, involves a serious drain both on the a man could always be sure of introducing his inventive and the colloquial faculties. To a companion to a new one, he would be looked man who is no arithmetician the task is not so upon as eligible and nimble in conversation. formidable. He has only to arrive with ten or The advantage of a riddle of course is, that it is twelve happy thoughts in his quiver, and to fire a portable species of preserved small talk, which them off successively in an unabashed way at can be carried away when the dance is over. his various partners. But to educated persons The recipient can have it out again for her of a mathematical turn of mind, who desire to next partner, and so on ad infinitum. The misdo what they have got to do scientifically and fortune, however, is that everybody knows the well, the difficulty is far less easily grappled answer to almost every riddle to which the with. Cambridge men, in particular, who are human brain has ever given birth; and, indeed, familiar with the science of figures, may well be if it were not so, mankind would not be comappalled when they reflect upon the solemn pelled, as it has been of late, to take refuge in business that lies before them in a single night. the cumbrous subsitute of double acrostics. At A dozen happy thoughts really go no way at all, first sight this antiquity of all decent riddles and it is only that sort of fortunate blindness seems an awkward obstacle. But, like other which young officers, and especially young obstacles, we think that it can be surmounted sailors, possess which can steel a thoughtful by those who are ready fairly to face it. The mind against the reflection. For, when one evident solution of the difficulty is to ask each comes to think the matter out, it is not merely successive and confiding young Englishwoman necessary to give each young Englishwoman a a riddle which has got no answer to it at all, fresh topic for her to digest before she is led and never will have any. Anybody who has back breathless to her corner. She has been tried this simple plan will bear testimony from dancing before with other manufacturers of experience to its complete social success. In small talk, perhaps half a dozen times; and the first place, riddles without answers can be the problem is, how to contrive a seventh happy invented as quick as lightning. A man has thought which is certain to be different from only to ask his partner, with an air of sprightliany of the six she has just been discussing. ness and mystery, if she knows why something And as every English girl has sistors and com- is like something else. The intellectual exerpanions, who will communicate to her next cise of trying to guess will do her good rather morning the various subjects of their various than harm, and as she will never think of dreamconversations, it becomes essential for a scien- ing that she is guessing at the unguessable, the tific man who reckons up all the chances to go interest of the exercise will be sustained. The loaded to a dance with such a plethora of happy real danger of the enterprise is that it is quite thoughts that he may be well excused for seem-possible to come upon some fanciful and thoughting gloomy under the burden. All common- less person who hates riddles. To those whose place suggestions, his reflection tells him, are winning card is over-trumped in this fashion, out of the question. Doubtless his partner has the best advice will be to try such a person heard all about the Opera, and the Ritualists, with a sensation novel. And when we say a and the Ocean Yacht Race, and the Paris Ex-sensation novel, we do not mean for a moment hibition before, and cannot reasonably be asked to hear of them again. If Englishmen, accordingly, look in earnest when they are dancing, they have an excellent reason for any amount of quiet melancholy, and all the more reason for it in proportion to their powers of computation. The embarrassment of their position is heightened when they consider that whatever they may wish to say must be said in five or ten minutes, when all will be over, and they must begin again. It thus becomes an important social question, which every one is interested in thinking out, whether there is such a thing as a science of small talk. All that is perhaps wanted, to make people look cheerful in a waltz or a quadrille, is to find a recipe for the production of conversation as fast as it can

any of the sensation novels of the day, which have possibly furnished a theme for her six previous and melancholy partners. Everything that has been said upon the subject of Mr. Trollope or Miss Braddon will have been repeated to her over and over again in the gloomiest of tones, and a woman of spirit will decline to give her attention to trite passages out of the last review served up for her digestion. The wisest and most satisfactory measure is to have a private and imaginary sensation novel, which nobody has ever written, nobody ever read, and which, as a logical consequence, nobody has ever talked about. As she never can have heard the name of a work which never had one, she will naturally be glad to hear about the plot. It is by no means so hard on the spur of