in time for that steamer; if not, he should | silence complete as to me and mine. Do follow in the next one. you doubt my power to lay on you this command? try to disobey me. At the end of the third month, the spell is raised. For the rest I spare you. I shall visit your grave a year and a day after it has received you." The waiter asked me my name. On my informing him, he gave me a note that Mr. Richards had left for me, in case I called. The note was as follows: "I wished you to utter what was in your mind. You obeyed. I have therefore established power over you: For three months from this day you can communicate to no living man what has passed between us-you can not even show this note to the friend by your side. During three months, So ends this strange story, which I ask no one to believe. I write it down exactly three months after I received the above note. I could not write it before, nor could I show to G-- in spite of his urgent request, the note which I read under the gas-lamp by his side. BY JAMES ORTON, AUTHOR OF "THE THREE PALACES," ETC. And now the joyous singing Of the Seraphs of Hope is ringing, How high hath grown the Belfry tower! From the gossamer chords of somnolence. When Woe unteaches the self-taught song; When Faith comes down from Heaven and brings The still small voice, for the iron tongue : Far up in the sky, But grand though faint is their minstrelsy! The Belfry bells are ringing, In silver chimes, But ever they tell of the golden climes, From the Dublin University Magazine THE LEGEND OF THE GOLDEN PRAYERS, AND OTHER POEMS.* eral characteristics of Mrs. Alexander's genius. These we will illustrate from her poems, and thus we may hope to give the public a fair conception of her book. THE reason of a woman's poetry being | occurred to us is to investigate the gengenerally true to nature and humanity, 80 far as she touches it, is, that she is throughout tender; for tenderness is a deep characteristic of truth. For example: a woman writing of a child or a sufferer is almost invariably happy in her expressions. No learning, no peculiarity of life, can divest her of this. Few women have had so decided an education as Mrs. Browning; yet how perfect, how delicately close to human nature is the scene with Marion's child in Aurora Leigh. And so, though a woman may not suggest to us strong or metaphysical thought, yet within her own limits she is true. This is the cause why female poetry is always worth reading once. But when a woman has gone beyond this, and not content with educating her heart, trains her intellect, and by its help cultivates her imagination, then her poetry becomes, like that of Mrs. Hemans, a household word. This is the excellence of Mrs. Alexander. She has ennobled imagination, whose source is in the heart, with the culture of reason. She has pruned that luxuriance of images, that wild growth of unchosen words which producing want of dignity and weight of thought, are the great and common faults of Poetasters. She has studied expression, and added a metrical training to her natural power of rhythm, and the result is a volume of poems which the world will welcome. It is always difficult to review a number of detached poems. The critic has no settled foundation to build his thoughts upon. No sooner has he erected a little edifice of praise or censure on one subject, than he is obliged to begin another. Therefore to concentrate a review on a book of this class, we must lay a foundation of our own; and the first which has We begin with womanliness. These poems are womanly in the highest and truest sense. There is no false sentiment; there is no morbid perversion of feminine powers. Her idea of self-sacrifice is not wrought into a false image of the virtue, as the French authors have attempted. Her idea of justice is not pushed beyond the limits of human infirmity. Her tenderness is not degraded into a weak excuse of wrong. Her sympathy does not degenerate into mere philanthropy. In a word her feelings are not the guide either of her reason or her conscience. With this preface we proceed to the poems. It is womanliness which sees in "Southey's" grave no lonely spot, but a hallowed hillock haunted by the love of winds and sunbeams. It is womanlike to feel that he was not dead, but only sleeping, while nature led all her handmaids forth to soothe his slumber: she could not but feel that all around was sympathizing with the poet's heart; that all the hights, and clouds, and waters were beautiful for him. It was womanlike to make the poet in his grave the center, the heart, of the landscape-to feel that round it rose the religion of nature "By that green grave where daisies grew, In Nature's own cathedral laid." But Mrs. Alexander rises to a far higher strain of poetry in the poem on Mrs. Hemans' grave. These lines, some of the best in the book, are full of true and noble thinking. Escaping from the girlish sentiment, beautiful as it always is, however common, of the poet finding fittest rest in the shade of gentle trees, and with the violet on his tomb, she turns and contemplates the grave of Mrs. Hemans, lying amid the city's roar and surge of men, as a higher and a truer thought. For the loftiest singers have interpreted men rather than nature. So with our authoress: "Let the poet lie among his brothers, Where great words of Christian truth shall He that hath most fellowship with others "And all Nature's charms, the bright, the real Are but shadows, though they live and move; Of his own more beautiful ideal, Of his dream of purity and love." Womanlike, too, is her dislike of conceiving any thing as utterly alone. The Dutch seaman's skeleton found by Lord Dufferin, lying open to the air on a little tongue of icy land, suggests to her a happy subject for a poem; and she paints around him the everlasting ice, and coruscating skies, as he slumbered where "Only the shy reindeer made Or the white bears came out and played But, in her pity, she can not leave him there, but weaves around him, in imaginative fancy, the dreams of home and the love of women. Womanlike, too, is her sympathy, and when that is so deep as to get into the heart of things, there it rises into imagination, a tropic river flowing deep and wide. She sees it as it were herself in calm, and says "The very beat of the broad river Is even as a silent heart;" a northern rock, beaten by the Atlantic surge! She watches it: as she gazes, to her it grows "Where such, a giant fast asleep, Lay folded in his purple cloak the solitude of the sea. She enters the mariner's heart, and the loneliness of the deep ocean is thus forcibly given: "His ship has drifted to the gale, the Legend of the Golden Prayers. Mrs. Alexander is describing the woodland, and thus she pierces to the very heart of forest scenery: "For the shadow of the forest lay On the crushed heart of the forest maid; Glorious sunshine, and the light of day, And the blue air of long summers played Ever in the green tops of the trees: Down below were depths and mysteries, Dim perspectives, and a humid smell Of decaying leaves and rotting cones; While, far up, the wild bee rung her bell, And the blossoms nodded on their thrones." For the forest is not only the home of joy and light, of racing leaves and flying sunshine-that were but a half description; but the home, also, of sorrow and darkness, where the mournful moan of homeless sounds is in the trees, and the gloom of the stillness of night lies heavier in the glades than on the open downs; is not only the home of life, where a myriad of flying creatures rejoice, and where the spring is abroad among the branches, but also the very habitation of decay and death, of leaves which rot into a humid soil, and living things which perish in a day-holds within it not only lessons which all men may read, but also strange weird mysteries and speechless horrors which curdle and hush the heart: and this last none have so deeply felt as the Germans. Goethe's ballad of the Erl King is a matchless expression of this human feeling of the forest. Who that has ever read has ever forgotten the knight's midnight ride through the forest which girdled the cottage where Undine lived, when every tree was writhing into mocking forms, and strange shapes of wickedness lived in every branch? Not only in the lines already quoted, but in the description which begins the second part of this legend, we recognize Mrs. Alexander's feeling of the double nature of the forest's expression of itself There she describes in us. "Where the twisted path is rough and red, The huge tree trunks, with their knotted bark, In and out, stand up on either side". the dark arches, and the contrasting Where, many a night, the full round moon brightness of a delicate little glade. Saw but herself and that white sail O'er all the central ocean strewn." But the noblest example of imagination in the book occurs in the second part of "A little patch of purest green Lieth a long gleam of blue and gold Where, when in the spring the flowers unfold, Hidden in the heart of the old wood.".. ་་ 24 But in this solitude she will not leave us: it is too terrible both in ugliness and beauty without humanity; and so there lies amid 66 a wider space" "A plot of open ground Whence the blind old woodman hears the surge Of the sea of leaves that toss their foam Of a bare field on a breezy down." simile! And if imagination may be said to be that which adorns the common, or penetrates through the unpoetical outward to the inward poetry, then the last verse of the poem, entitled Sorrow on the Sea is imaginative- "Then bring her back where burdened Clyde Round many a lashing wheel raves white." The scene is made poetical. The river, like a strong man, is burdened by the weight of shipping-the poetical of steam is seized in the words "lashing wheel" power, unweariness, rapidity; and it is not the discolored stream, but the gleaming madness of the foam, which the poet pictures to our view. Apropos of the poem-as a work of art-it would have been much better had the two last verses been altogether omitted. They are an incumbrance. Before, however, we leave it for some time, we instance from it another example of imaginative power"The feathery clouds Lie loosened on the distant hills." No one who has watched the lifting of a flock of vapors from the sides of a mountain, "shepherded by the slow, unwilling wind," but must at once recognize the imaginative penetration of the word "loosened." It is exactly the right term. For the clouds when rising after rain always appear first to shake themselves free from the side of the hill, still keeping, however, its outline, and to lie, seemingly, at the distance from it of a yard, so that we imagine it possible to walk in a clear space, and touch the mountain with one hand, and the cloud mass with the other. It is when that condition takes place, and generally not till then, that the mist lifts. That is what is painted for us by the word loosened. Another characteristic of Mrs. Alexander's genius is felicity of expression. No natural gift is worth any thing without accurate and steady training. No class of artists neglect culture so much as second-rate poets. They do not revere their gift sufficiently-they use it with pride for themselves, and do not feel that it is not theirs-for self-but theirs for all the world. It needs the solemnity of that thought, and the dignity of that motive, to impel a second-rate poet to careful training, and the highest praise is due to our authoress for her manifest cultivation of her natural gift. A few instances of this felicitous and condensed expression will not be out of place. Here is a beautiful contrast drawn by a father over his daughter's grave, between her youthful health and her sad decline, and both thoughts linked to his native land by a few graceful touches. "Ever a short, low cough I hear, There lies in mine a thin, small hand; Or a voice singeth in mine ear; The voice that haunted the old land. "When that brave mountain breeze of ours is That dashed the scent from golden furze, And swept across the heather flowers, Touched not a brighter cheek than hers." The character of Mrs. Hemans' poetry given in a line— "And the wind in the tall trees should lend her Musical delight on stormy days, With a sound half-chivalrous, half-tender, Taste is thus happily described"For what is taste, but the heart's earnest striving After the beautiful in form and thought, From the pure past a nicer sense deriving, And ever by fair nature taught." The Irish Mother's Lament for her sons in a far land, is imagined with great delicacy; and if any one should wish, after a course of hackneyed nonsense on the Princess Royal's marriage, to cheer his heart with something fresh, poetical, pictorial, with something which touches the exact points to be touched, let him read the Royal Bridal in this book. We pass on to another characteristicreligious feeling. For Mrs. Alexander's religion is no name, but a universal and inward power; is no sentiment which it is pretty to introduce, and effective, as the peroration, so to speak, of a poem, but | pression, is based on her consciousness with her an essence, without which all of this: things are dull. To her God's presence is felt in the universe, from the smallest leaf to the blaze of the star Sirius. The description of the poor woman whom the Lady Beata had taught from "her Gospel," and of her simple recognition of Christ in all the forest landscape, is exquisite. The hymns, however, are the worst writing in the book. The scene-painting of the death of Christ, in which we hoped Mrs. Alexander would not have indulged, is a degradation to the sufferer. The cross in itself was no infamy to the spotless One. It was not the nail which pierced his hands-it was the iron which entered into his soul that drew from him that exceeding bitter cry. Mrs. Alexander has yet another characteristic: it is her deep sense of the connec. tion between Nature and Humanity. She has expressed this thus: "From Nature's beauteous outward things, What gleams of hidden life we win! For still the world without us flings Strong shadows of the world within." Now these analogies are often carried too far; Nature is made into Humanity, and the result is that poets who are not so appear Pantheistic. The reason of this is, that the dignity of the human element is not sufficiently recognized. But in our author's poetry this is not so: she marks the want of joy and suffering in Nature. She sees that what seems thus in Nature is in reality only ourselves projecting on the world without. She feels that we have no greater dignity than our capacity of suffering. But Nature has yet another office, one which has ever been to poets a mine of wealth. It is founded on the truth that the Author of Nature is also the Author of Humanity. God speaks through the dumb universe to man; and we understand the silent words, because he who made the worlds has given us a mind similar in kind, though not in degree, to his. Owing to this likeness, the things seen voice forth to us the things unseen, and from all outward life we can draw deep lessons for our inward spirit. Mrs. Alexander has felt this strongly. Every poetic heart must feel and tell it to the world. One poem especially, which we quote for its finish and roundness of ex Waves, waves, waves, Sing, and work for God along the strand. "Leaves, leaves, leaves, Thoughts, thoughts, thoughts, Breaking, wave-like, on the mind's strange shore, Rustling, leaf-like, through it evermore, In another poem she guards this method of analogy from mistake. For some think that the comparison of these relations is sufficiently strong to be accepted as pos itive proof of spiritual truths. Men have attempted to establish the reality of a resurrection by the analogies of spring, and the chrysalis opening into a butterfly. But these do not prove the immortal life of form, they only render it probable, and serve to confirm the truth when once it has been received. Useless as proof, they are useful as helps of faith. In the lines we quote our readers may see how the philosophy of this may be touched into poetry: "Silent as snow from his airy chamber, Down on the earth drops the withered leaf, Silently back on the heart of the dreamer, Noticed of none, falls the secret grief. "Yet ye deceive us, beautiful prophets; For, like one side of an ocean shell Cast by the tide on a dripping sand-beach, Only a half of the truth ye tell. "Much of decadence and death ye sing us; Rightly ye tell us earth's hopes are vain; But of the life out of death no whisper, Saying: 'We die, but we live again.' The last characteristic we shall mention is gracefulness. It is this which marks the book especially. It is graceful in its strength, and graceful even in its weaknesses. It has no rugged vigor, like an oak of centuries which braves and bends not to the blast; but delicate power, the hardy silver-columned birch which waves in infinite gracefulness, triumphant and beautiful in the center of the storm. like |