Darkness comes showering down upon me fast;

The wind is whining like a houseless dog;-
The cold, cold wind is whining round thy grave,
It comes up wet and dripping from the fen;
The tawny twilight creeps into the dark,
Like a dun, angry lion to his den.

There is a forlorn moaning in the air

A sobbing round the spot where thou art sleeping;
There is a dull glare in the wintry sky,

As though the eye of heaven were red with weeping.
Sharp gusts of tears come raining from the clouds,
The ancient church looks desolate and wild;

There is a deep, cold shiver in the earth,

As though the great world hunger'd for her child.

The very trees fling their gaunt arms on high,
Calling for Summer to come back again;
Earth cries that Heaven has quite deserted her;
Heaven answers but in showers of drizzling rain.
The rain comes plashing on my pallid face;

Night, like a witch, is squatting on the ground;
The storm is rising, and its howling wail

Goes baying round her, like a hungry hound.

The clouds, like grim, black faces, come and go,
One tall tree stretches up against the sky;
It lets the rain through, like a trembling hand
Pressing thin fingers on a watery eye.

The moon came, but shrank back, like a young girl
Who has burst in upon funereal sadness;

One star came-Cleopatra-like, the Night

Swallow'd this one pearl in a fit of madness,

And here I stand, the weltering heaven above,

Beside thy lonely grave, my lost, my buried love!"

Fifthly, this poet deduces a grand Christian moral from his story and whole poem. Alexis, his hero, after outliving many difficulties, trials, and doubts, comes to a Christian conclusion, in which he expresses the following magnificent passage (page 155) :—

"The heart is a dumb angel to the soul

Till Christ pass by, and touch its bud-like lips.
Not unto thee, bold spirit on the wing,
Does the bright form of Truth reveal itself;
Soar as thou wilt, the heavens are still above,
And to thy questionings no answer comes-
Only the mocking of the dumb, sad stars.
Awhile thy search may promise thee success,
And now and then wild lights may play above,

Which, with exultant joy, thou takest for
The gleaming portals of the home of Truth-
'Twas but a mirage where thou saw'st thyself,
And not the image of the passing God!

Oh, with what joy we all set out for truth-
Newer Crusaders for the Holy Land-

Till one by one our guides and comrades fall,
And then some starry night, some cold bleak night,
We find we are alone upon the sands,

Far from all human aids and sympathies,

While the black tide comes roaring up the waste.

The highest truths lie nearest to the heart;
No soarings of the soul can find out God.
I saw a bee who woke one summer night,
And taking the white stars for flowers, went up
Buzzing and booming in the hungry blue;
And when its wings were weary with the flight,
And the cold airs of morn were coming up,
Lo! the white flowers were melting out of view,
And it came wheeling back-ah! heavily-
To the great laughing earth that gleam'd below!
God will not show himself to prying eyes:
Could Reason scale the battlements of heaven,
Religion were a vain and futile thing,
And Faith a toy for childhood or the mad;
The humble heart sees farther than the soul.
Love is the key to knowledge-to true power;
And he who loveth all things, knoweth all.
Religion is the true Philosophy!

Faith is the last great link twixt God and man.
There is more wisdom in a whisper'd prayer,
Than in the ancient lore of all the schools:
The soul upon its knees holds God by the hand.
Worship is wisdom as it is in heaven!
'I do believe! help Thou my unbelief!'
Is the last, greatest utterance of the soul.
God came to me as Truth-I saw him not;
He came to me as Love-and my heart broke,
And from its inmost deeps there came a cry,
'My Father! oh! my Father, smile on me ;'
And the Great Father smiled.

Come not to God with questions on thy lips;
He will have love-love and a holy trust,
And the self-abnegation of the child.
'Tis a far higher wisdom to believe,

Than to cry Question, at the porch of truth.
Think not the Infinite will calmly brook
The plummet of the finite in its deeps.
The humble cottager I saw last night,
Sitting among the shadows at his door,
With his great Bible open on his knee-

His grandchild sporting near him on the grass,
When his day's work was done-and pointing still
With horny finger as he read the lines,
Had, in his child-like trust and confidence,
Far more of wisdom on his furrow'd brow,
Than Kant in proving that there is a God,
Or Plato buried in Atlantis dreams!"

Still more directly is the moral of the poem stated in the following words, which leave Alexis a "little child :"

"The last secret that we learn is this

That being is a circle after all.

And the last line we draw in after life,

Rejoins the are of childhood when complete :

That to be more than man is to be less."

We need not dwell on the identity of this statement with the words of Jesus-" Except a man become as a little child, he can in no wise enter the kingdom of heaven;" nor express our joy at finding these words-which are at present a stumbling-block to many, in this proud and sceptical age, when intellect is worshipped as a God, and humility trampled on as a slave-taken up, set in the splendid imagery, and sung in the lofty measures of one of our most gifted young poets.

We have not analysed the story, for this reason, that story, properly speaking, there is none. Two couples are the principal interlocutors-Ferdinand and Caroline-Alexis and Flora. The first are all bliss and blue sky together; they seem almost in heaven already. Alexis, again, is a kind of Manfred-without the melancholy end of that hero. Certain spirits form a conspiracy against him, and lead him through wild weltering abysses of struggle-very powerfully described -during which he forgets poor Flora, and a lady named Edith dies in love for him. When he returns to himself, and reaches the solid ground of hope, he returns to Flora too, and they are left in a very happy frame-she blessing the hour of his deliverance, and he resuming his old poetical aspirations. The poem closes with a song, in the "Locksley Hall" style, on the "Poet's Mission," which is not, we think, in the author's best manner, and will be thought, by many, not quite in keeping with the Christian moral of the poem before enunciated.

And now for fault-finding. First, we state the want of

objective interest. "Night and the Soul" is just a heap of fine and beautiful things. The story has no hinge. The plot is nothing. You might almost begin to read the book at the end, and close it at the beginning. Secondly, there is no dramatic skill displayed in the management of the dialogue. All the characters talk equally well, and all talk too long. All are poets or poetesses, uttering splendid soliloquies. Hence inevitably arise considerable monotony and tedium. Thirdly, we demur to that Spirit-scene altogether. Either these beings should have been described as doing more, or doing less. As it is, their introduction is a mere excrescence, although it is redeemed by much striking poetry. Fourthly, there is a good deal of the hideous in the poem, imitated, apparently, from the worse passages of "Festus." We give one specimen the worst, however, in the volume (page 132):

"Last night I dream'd the universe was mad,
And that the sun its Cyclopean eye
Roll'd glaring like a maniac's in the heavens;
And moons and comets, link'd together, scream'd
Like bands of witches at their carnivals,
And stream'd like wandering hell along the sky;
And that the awful stars, through the red light,
Glinted at one another wickedly,

Throbbing and chilling with intensest hate,
While through the whole a nameless horror ran;
And worlds dropp'd from their place i' the shuddering.
Like leaves of Autumn, when a mighty wind

Makes the trees shiver through their thickest robes.
Great spheres crack'd in the midst, and belch'd out flame,
And sputtering fires went crackling over heaven;

And space yawn'd blazing stars; and Time shrieked out,
That hungry fire was eating everything!

And scorch'd fiends, down in the nether hell,
Cried out, The universe is mad-is mad!'
And the great thing in its convulsions flung
System on system, till the caldron boiled
(Space was the caldron, and all hell the fire),
And every giant limb o' the universe
Dilated and collapsed, till it grew wan,
And I could see its naked ribs gleam out,
Beating like panting fire-and I awoke.

'Twas not all dream;-such is the world to me."

This will never do. Fifthly, Mr. Bigg appears to us to write too fast and too diffusely. Many of his passages would be greatly improved by leaving out every third line.

over.

This, however, is an ungracious task, and we must hurry it The author of "Night and the Soul" is a genuine poet He has original genius-prolific fancy-the resources, too, of an ample scholarship-an unbounded command of poetic language and, above all, a deeply-human, reverent, and pious spirit breathing in his soul. On the future career of such an one, there can rest no shadows of uncertainty. A little pruning, a little more pains in elaborating, and the selection of an interesting story for his future poems, are all he requires to rank him, by and by, with our foremost living poets.

NO. IV.-GERALD MASSEY.*

GERALD MASSEY has not the voluptuous tone, the felicitous and highly-wrought imagery, or the sustained music of Smith; nor the diffusive splendor and rich general spirit of poetry in which all Bigg's verses are steeped; nor the amazing subtlety, depth, and pervasive purpose of Yendys's song. His poetry is neither sustained as a whole, nor highly finished in almost any of its parts; its power lies in separate sparkles of intense brilliance, shining on what is generally a dark ground-like moonbeams gleaming on a midnight wave. Whether it be from the extreme brightness of those sparkles, or from the gloom which they relieve, certain we are that we have never made so many marks in the same compass in any poem. Indeed, we have seldom followed any such practice; but in Massey's case we felt irresistibly compelled to it-his beauties had such a sudden and startling effect. They rose at our feet like fluttered birds of game; they stood up in our path like rose-bushes amid groves of pine. Before saying anything more of this poet's merits or faults, we shall transcribe some of these markings.

*The Ballad of Babe Christabel, and other Lyrical Poems. With additional Pieces, and a Preface. By GERALD MASSEY.