"I suffer mute and lonely, yet another

Uplifts his voice to let me know a brother

Travels the same wild paths though out of sight."'

Happily all men have not walked in Thomson's City of Despair, but too many have done so, and they must feel a bitter kind of comfort, such comfort as comes of tears, in having all its horrors so faithfully and sympathetically recorded.

In the gloomy delineation of life Thomson has had of course many predecessors, but perhaps none of them have equalled him in the intense spirit of desolation revealed in The City of Dreadful Night, not only in direct utterance, but in imagery large and terribly majestic, and in the thorough keeping of the illustrations of the poem with its general sentiment. The colossal imagination of both idea and symbol show the influence of no other writer. Equally graphic and equally earnest, though in a distinctly different vein, are two poems in the same volume called Sunday at Hampstead, and Sunday up the River. They are genuine idyls of the people, yet without any trace of vulgarity. They are charged with brightness and healthy joy in living, as fully as the leading poem of the book is fraught with darkness and despair.

In these days of poetic schools, to some one of which a man must generally be relegated, if his work is to be considered at all, there is something remarkable in the solitariness of this poet, who can be classed in no poetic fraternity. It is not likely that The City of Dreadful Night, through the awful blackness of which no ray of light penetrates, will ever be a popular poem, but amid the uncertainties of modern speculation, the hesitating lights which still too often discover no sure track, the poem will stand out as a monument of solemn and uncompromising gloom. Intense sincerity, joined to a vivid imagination, constitute Thomson's claims to be remembered. Whether he speaks to us from the fastnesses of his Dreadful City, or in a happier mood breaks into snatches of song as he drifts down stream in his boat, one feels brought in contact with a strong personal individuality. This strong individuality, whether expressing itself in life or poetry, is not welcome to all persons, but those on whom it seizes find in it a fascination which it is difficult for any other quality to substitute.

PHILIP BOURKE MARSTON.

THE CITY OF DREADFUl Night.

I.

The City is of Night; perchance of Death,
But certainly of Night; for never there
Can come the lucid morning's fragrant breath
After the dewy dawning's cold grey air;
The moon and stars may shine with scorn or pity;
The sun has never visited that city,

For it dissolveth in the daylight fair.

Dissolveth like a dream of night away;

Though present in distempered gloom of thought And deadly weariness of heart all day.

But when a dream night after night is brought Throughout a week, and such weeks few or many Recur each year for several years, can any

Discern that dream from real life in aught?

For life is but a dream whose shapes return,
Some frequently, some seldom, some by night
And some by day, some night and day: we learn,
The while all change and many vanish quite,
In their recurrence with recurrent changes
A certain seeming order; where this ranges
We count things real; such is memory's might.

A river girds the city west and south,

The main north channel of a broad lagoon, Regurging with the salt tides from the mouth;

Waste marshes shine and glister to the moon

For leagues, then moorland black, then stony ridges ? Great piers and causeways, many noble bridges,

Connect the town and is'et suburbs strewn.

Upon an easy slope it lies at large,

And scarcely overlaps the long curved crest Which swells out two leagues from the river marge. A trackless wilderness rolls north and west, Savannahs, savage woods, enormous mountains, Bleak uplands, black ravines with torrent fountains ; And eastward rolls the shipless sea's unrest.

The city is not ruinous, although

Great ruins of an unremembered past, With others of a few short years ago

More sad, are found within its precincts vast. The street-lamps always burn; but scarce a casement In house or palace front from roof to basement Doth glow or gleam athwart the mirk air cast.

The street-lamps burn amidst the baleful glooms,
Amidst the soundless solitudes immense

Of rangèd mansions dark and still as tombs.

The silence which benumbs or strains the sense Fulfils with awe the soul's despair unweeping: Myriads of habitants are ever sleeping,

Or dead, or fled from nameless pestilence!

Yet as in some necropolis you find

Perchance one mourner to a thousand dead, So there; worn faces that look deaf and blind

Like tragic masks of stone. With weary tread, Each wrapt in his own doom, they wander, wander, Or sit foredone and desolately ponder

Through sleepless hours with heavy drooping head.

Mature men chiefly, few in age or youth,

A woman rarely, now and then a child:

A child! If here the heart turns sick with ruth
To see a little one from birth defiled,

Or lame or blind, as preordained to languish

Through youthless life, think how it bleeds with anguish To meet one erring in that homeless wild.

They often murmur to themselves, they speak
To one another seldom, for their woe

Broods maddening inwardly and scorns to wreak
Itself abroad; and if at whiles it grow

To frenzy which must rave, none heeds the clamour,
Unless there waits some victim of like glamour,
To rave in turn, who lends attentive show.

The City is of Night, but not of Sleep;

There sweet sleep is not for the weary brain; The pitiless hours like years and ages creep,

A night seems termless hell. This dreadful strain Of thought and consciousness which never ceases, Or which some moments' stupor but increases,

This, worse than woe, makes wretches there insane.

They leave all hope behind who enter there:
One certitude while sane they cannot leave,
One anodyne for torture and despair;

The certitude of Death, which no reprieve
Can put off long; and which, divinely tender,
But waits the outstretched hand to promptly render
That draught whose slumber nothing can bereave.

XVII.

How the moon triumphs through the endless nights! How the stars throb and glitter as they wheel Their thick processions of supernal lights

Around the blue vault obdurate as steel

And men regard with passionate awe and yearning The mighty marching and the golden burning,

And think the heavens respond to what they feel.

Boats gliding like dark shadows of a dream,
Are glorified from vision as they pass

The quivering moonbridge on the deep black stream;
Cold windows kindle their dead glooms of glass

To restless crystals; cornice, dome, and column
Emerge from chaos in the splendour solemn ;

Like faëry lakes gleam lawns of dewy grass.

With such a living light these dead eyes shine,
These eyes of sightless heaven, that as we gaze
We read a pity, tremulous, divine,

Or cold majestic scorn in their pure rays:
Fond man! they are not haughty, are not tender;
There is no heart or mind in all their splendour,
They thread mere puppets all their marvellous mazc

If we could near them with the flight unflown,
We should but find them worlds as sad as this,
Or suns all self-consuming like our own

Enringed by planet worlds as much amiss:

They wax and wane through fusion and confusion;
The spheres eternal are a grand illusion,

The empyrean is a void abyss.

XXI.

Anear the centre of that northern crest

Stands out a level upland bleak and bare,
From which the city east and south and west
Sinks gently in long waves; and throned there
An Image sits, stupendous, superhuman,
The bronze colossus of a wingèd Woman,
Upon a graded granite base foursquare1.

Low-seated she leans forward massively,

With cheek on clenched left hand, the forearm's might Erect, its elbow on her rounded knee;

Across a clasped book in her lap the right
Upholds a pair of compasses; she gazes
With full set eyes, but wandering in thick mazes
Of sombre thought beho'ds no outward sight.

The description refers to Albert Dürer's 'Melencolia.'