Ay, tho' that cup be filled with dear heart's blood instead of indicate a classical formation; but we must pass

THE WANDERER, BY OWEN MEREDITH,*. As she was alive a few minutes before, and beckonThe author of this volume uses a name to which ing her love from the window, circumstantial it is said he is no more entitled than any other evidence would carry the case hard against the person, unless he proposes to employ the assumed bat, the flowers, or the poet. However, there is title for poetry, and his own for politics. He may no doubt left that the poet, Owen Meredith, was attain a prescriptive claim to Owen Meredith in the wicked one. He tells it all, page 407 to this manner. His "Wanderer" in a short period | Fatima. Verse 1. She was pure as April suowhaving reached a second edition, gives further drops are," and he was to wed her. 2. At sunset proof that poetry sells still, even in this iron age they sat "among the hot pomegranate boughs," of joint-stock companies, railways, und telegraphs. that we fancy is very pleasant, and the boughs Through the entire volume two or three veins run. might be still more useful at noon. 3. She was Perhaps the manner of the volume excuses irregu- singing, but she stopped to gaze at him, very larity or even renders it necessary. It need not naturally and proper; and she inquired why he did however, excuse some other matters. We can not speak; a question that other young ladies scarcely suppose two works more dissimilar than might have been inclined to whisper. 4. He the "Idylls of the King," and the "Wanderer," fouud means to reply :yet they are not destitute of some points of resem. blance-not only in the common facts that both are books, that both are poems, and that the subject of both is mainly love-but chiefly and more obviously that both draw lessons and educe morals imperceptibly to the reader out of their subjects. Owen Meredith disfigures his quaint verses with abrupt and unnatural conclusions, and with a mysterious series of threads through all, as if he meant to show that they might have been linked together, but the binders work was left halffinished. The epilogue and the prologue are the two boards of the book lightly stitched together, and there seems to have been an intention to

make the leaves a serial, but the matter is left doubtful. Of course, therefore, some arrangements have been neglected, and the result can scarcely be styled the carelessness of art. The reader meets every here and there absurd fragments like flies in ointment, only the flies are rather thick here and not only destroy the perfume, but establish something else of their own. There is, "Going Back Again" at page 310 consisting of only seven times four are twenty-eight lines, but with much in them of horrible stuff, verse 1. The

writer dreamed that he was in Italy. 2. That he came to a palace with open windows, and his love sat at one of them, and "beckoned him" courteously" up the stairs." 3. The palace must have been of great dimensions, for he roamed through many corridors, chambers of state and open doors, before he reached her. 4. At last he came to the bridal chamber, and the flowers were 'talking fast" and "whispering at the window." 5. In the stillness of the place he heard every word they said, notwithstanding they were whispering beneath their breath with fear; for somebody was dead. 6. When he came to "the little rose coloured room, which seems to have been beyond the bridal chamber, the bat flew out of the window whereat his love sat, 7.

She sat with her guitar on her knee,

But she was not singing a note,

For some one had drawn (ah, who could it be)
A knife across her thoat.

*London: Chapman and Hall. 1 vol. pp 436, 2nd Edition,

Silent I am, young Fatima,

For silent is my soul in me,

And language will not help the want
Of that which cannot ever be.

5. Fatima very naturally puts the further interro
gative
But wherefore is thy spirit sad.

Aud receives this reply ;

Because thy face is wonderous like

The face of one I knew that's dead.

6. A lady may be jealous even of the dead, and Fatima, perhaps hastily and rudely inquires who kissed him first-a stupid question to put to any young man whose infancy was passed in a nursery. 7. And Fatima moralizes upon "she that's dead," being so loved by him that her memory stirred him yet, and his face grew pale. 8. He explains

Ay, Fatima, I loved her well,

With all of love's an l life's despair,
Or else I had not strangled her,

That night in her own fatal hair.

Now there's the secret. He ran from Italy in time to save his life, only he did not draw a knife across the throat of the lady at the window, but hanged her by her own golden hair. The crime was not greatly reduced by the instrument; but it was made a little more romantic.

If any persons consider things of this kind
deserving of a place in a volume that pretends to,
and possesses the elements of real worth, we are
sorry for their taste. Owen Meredith not being
destitute, being even rich in genius, should not
mar it by such mockeries as those we have
is scandalous to mix up the dogrels of thought
quoted. He hates scandal-that is right, but it
with other and living thoughts He chokes ideas
with paltry puns.
volume; it abounds with it, and there is concise
Yet there is good matter in the
and earnest writing; thus page 65 :—

I know how tender friends of me,
Have talked with broken hint and glance:
The choicest flower of calumny,

That seem, like weeds, to spring from chance.

That small, small, imperceptible

Small talk, which cuts like powder'd glass

Ground in Tophana-none can tell

Where lurks the power the poison has!

I may be worse than they would prove,
(Who knows the worst of any man?)
But, right or wrong, be sure may love
Is not what they conceive, or can.
Nor do I question what thou art,

Nor what thy life, in great or small,
Thou art, I know, what all my heart

Must beat or break for. That is all.

The first verse contains all that needs remark;
the second is a pretty conceit. All of the first
that we care to note is the first sentence concern-
ing fate. The opinion is correct. We cannot
make, and we may modify and mould that which
men call fate. We cannot make circumstances,
but we can give their character to occurrences,
and that is all their value. At page 387, however,
we find all this good doctrine overthrown in the
Euthanasia.
We quote the lines :—

Alas! 'tis not the creed that saves the man;
It is the man that justifies the creed;
And each must save his own soul as he can,
Since each is burthened with a different need.
Round each the bandit passions lurk, and, fast
And furious, swarm to strip the pilgrim bare:
Then oft, in lonely places unaware,

Mr. Meredith's love letter, page 66, being original
and suitable to the trials of Sir Lancelot, might
have been offered as an example to that knight if
he had been alive, but he is dead, and dead twelve
hundred years; yet the old sorrows live now as
they lived in his time. People, poets especially,
never get into the right connexion somehow; and
we can only commend the passionate resignation
of Mr. O. M. to the world, as an example of all
that may be dared, determined, and done in diffi-
cult circumstances. He however falls into blunders
theoretically, even where he means to do well.
This love letter is addressed to somebody who
loved him, and married another person whom she
did not love, without apparently the common
causes for such errors, and perhaps we may add
guilt, although the word is somewhat strong for and at page 387, each man—
the world. Notwithstanding these mistakes the
poet wants to maintain a Platonic correspondence,
and that may be possible. He writes in a religious
and resigned strain. After his own fashion he is
religious. He says towards the middle of his

Wherefore it happens, in this riddling world,

That, where sin came not, sorrow yet should be; Why heaven's most hurtful thunders should be hurled, At what seems noblest in humanity.

And we are punished for our purest deeds,

And chastened for our holiest thoughts; alas! There is no reason found in all the creeds,

Why these things are, nor whence they come to pass. But in the heart of man a secret voice

There is which speaks, and will not be restrain'd Which cries to grief, weep on, while I rejoice, Knowing that somewhere all will be explained.

There is no difficulty on the last line. All will
be explained--and there may be many curious
explanations, or what would seem to us startling
now; but the first and second lines of the quota-
tion form the difficulty. Sin comes first, and sor-
row next. The circumstances of the letter pre-
They could not have occurred
suppose sin.
otherwise. These errors in theology arise-with-
out saying anything for a forgotten revelation-
out of shallow thought. This particular grief
came not without sin, unless it is misrepresented.
The poet tells his correspondent some farther
theories, that may not be exactly true :-

Man cannot make, but may ennoble fate
By nobly bearing it. So let us trust,
Not to ourselves but God, and calmly wait

Love's orient out of darkness and of dust.
Farewell, and yet again farewell, and yet
Never farewell-if farewell mean to fare
Alone and disunited. Love hath set

Our days in music to the self-same air,

Fall on him, and do murder him at last. Euthanasia is a composition with a wide gulf It is of an entirely difbetween it and Fatima. ferent caste, and we doubt the propriety of jumbling such opposite subject together; but if at page

73,

Man cannot make, but may ennoble fate,

Must save his own soul as he can,

we are unable to reconcile the opinions, and scarcely see the force of the following quotation from Euthanasia, which, alone, we should appre

ciate

·-

And so the Prince of Life, in dying gave

Undying life to mortals. Once He stood
Among His fellows, on this side the grave,
A man, perceptible to flesh and blood:
Now, taken from our sight, he dwells no less
Within our mortal memory and thought-
The mystery of all He was and wrought

Is made a part of general consciousness.
We recommend poets to keep clear of abstrusc
subjects in their verses, unless they understand
them well. These topics only bear careful hand-
ling, and there are not many readers who care for
well. Arguments on these subjects have been
logic in verse. It has been placed there-placed
combinations of genius and wisdom. They have
woven up in pleasing lays and verses, with rare
been tempered by long experiences; and until a
man holds firm and fixed principles, he need not
and made contradictory, even in beautiful and
dress up moods that presently may be modulated
choice language.

The latter part of the volume contains religious but they could all bear to be weeded with advanhymns of great merit. There are several of them, tage. The best of them has, as its text, Mark

xvi. 6.

If Jesus came to earth again,

And walked and talked in field and street,
Who would not lay his human pain
Low at those heavenly feet ?

And leave the loom, and leave the lute,
And leave the volume on the shelf,
To follow Him, unquestioning, mute,
If 'twere the Lord himself?

How many a brow with care o'erworn,
How many a heart with grief o'erladen,
How many a youth with love forlorn,
How many a mourning maiden-

Would leave the baffling earthly prize
Which fails the earthly, weak endeavour,
To gaze into those holy eyes,
And drink content for ever?
The mortal hope I ask with tears

Of heaven-to soothe this mortal pain-
The dream of all my darken'd years-
I should not cling to then.

The pride that prompts the bitter jest-
(Sharp styptic of a bleeding heart!)
Would fail, and humbly leave confest
The sin that brought the smart.

THE WANDERER.

I would not ask one word of this
If I might only hide my head,
On that beloved breast, and kiss
The wounds where Jesus bled.

And I, where'er He went, would go,
Nor question where the path might lead,
Enough to know that, here below,

I walked with God indeed!

His sheep along the cool, the shade,
By the still water-course He leads,
His lambs upon His breast are laid,
His hungry one's He feeds.

Safe in his bosom I should lie,

Hearing, where'ere His steps might be,

Calm waters, murmuring, murmuring by,
To meet the mighty sea.

especially the labour of thought. It is bad enough to read just now, and the hardship is increased if the reader be obliged to dive after and struggle for the meaning of all he reads. Something airy and light, like the following verses, are good enough for the seaside-or any other place; temperature being, especially where there is no shade to be had, except a choking room, or, what is inconceivably worse, a room cooled by draughts-128

in the sun :

We are not certain that the writer quite understands himself when he makes to himself the The dedication of the volume has, perhaps, its following beautiful proposals as the results, not of faith but of sight. Beings of higher intellectual finest verses-the most pleasing and the most strength than our race saw and fell. They stum-readable at a period when all labour is a bore, and bled who, so far as we know, were not required to walk by faith, but by sight. Even when the Prince of Life lived visibly on the earth, He spake -so said a Pagan soldier-as never man spake. Even when He died, He died-so said another Roman soldier-as man could not die, surrounded by such circumstances as revealed His power. Even when He rose again, He rose with such accompaniments as scared a Roman guard, and drove them from their watch. Yet we know not that all, or any of these men, believed; that they who thus acknowledged His divinity on the earth, followed him so lovingly and trustingly through all their lives, when He had passed in visible presence from earth, as our poet would resolve to follow-forgetful that intellectual men, who saw his miracles, and might have followed by sight, went back to their schools, their disputations, their hard dogmas, their self-sufficiency, their personal pride, their persecutions, and their woe-workings; just as we, left to our own guidance, yet endowed with this sight, might pass on to perish-as they perished-how and where we know not. They came upon the page; they looked hard as the flint of Horeb; they passed.

If I might crouch within the fold
Of that white robe (a wounded bird)
The face that Mary saw behold,
And hear the words she heard-
I would not ask one word of all
That now my nature yearns to know;
The legend of the ancient Fall;
The source of human woe.
What hopes in other worlds may hide;
What griefs yet unexplored in this;
How fares the spirit within the wide
Waste tract of that abyss,

Which seares the heart (since all we know
Of life is only conscious sorrow)

Lest novel life be novel woc

In death's undawned to-morrow.

As in the laurel's murmurous leaves
'Twas fabled, once, a virgin dwelt ;
Within the poet's page yet heaves
The poet's heart, and loves, or grieves,
Or triumphs as it felt.

A human spirit here records

The annals of its human strife,

A human hand hath touched these chords.
These songs may all be idle words;
And yet they once were life.

I gave my harp to memory:
She sung of hope, when hope was young-
Of youth, as youth no more may be;
And, since she sung of youth, to thee,
Friend of my youth, she sung.

"The Wanderer," with many errors of judgment, has many excellencies of style. The genius of Owen Meredith is not a matter admitting of doubt; and it is a pity that it should be dashed by eccentricities which are alien altogether from genius. "The Wanderer" is not his first work. It probably will not be his last, and he may add literary honours to a name that has them in abundance, and help to assert for his generation a claim not inferior to that made for the last.

A dozen of volumes beside us should have been mentioned in this number; but we have no more space than would serve to catalogue them —and even a list of poems is not less dull reading than any other book list.

476

THE JOLLY VETERANS.

MIDDLE MEN.-No. II.