The old man weeps.

His aimless hands the joyless books put by;
As one that dreams and fears to wake, the sage
With vacant eye stifles the trembling taper,
Lets in the moonlight-and for once is wise.

SONNETS.

AMERICA.

Men say, Columbia, we shall hear thy guns.
But in what tongue shall be thy battle-cry?
Not that our sires did love in years gone by,
When all the Pilgrim Fathers were little sons
In merrie homes of Englaunde? Back, and see
Thy satchelled ancestor! Behold, he runs

To mine, and, clasped, they tread the equal lea
To the same village-school, where side by side
They spell 'Our Father.' Hard by, the twin pride
Of that grey hall whose ancient or el gleams
Thro' yon baronial pines, with looks of light
Our sister-mothers sit beneath one tree.

Meanwhile our Shakespeare wanders past and dreams
His Helena and Hermia. Shall we fight?

Nor force nor fraud shall sunder us? Oh ye
Who north or south, on east or western land,
Native to noble sounds, say truth for truth,
Freedom for freedom, love for love, and God
For God; oh ye who in eternal youth
Speak with a living and creative flood
This universal English, and do stand

Its breathing book; live worthy of that grand
Heroic utterance-parted, yet a whole,
Far, yet unsevered, -children brave and free
Of the great Mother-tongue, and ye shall be
Lords of an Empire wide as Shakespeare's soul,
Sublime as Milton's immemorial theme,

And rich as Chaucer's speech, and fair as Spenser's dream

THE COMMON GRAVE.

Last night beneath the foreign stars I stood,
And saw the thoughts of those at home go by
To the great grave upon the hill of blood.
Upon the darkness they went visibly,
Each in the vesture of its own distress.
Among them there came One, frail as a sigh,
And like a creature of the wilderness

Dug with her bleeding hands. She neither cried
Nor wept; nor did she see the many stark
And dead that lay unburied at her side.

All night she toiled; and at that time of dawn,
When Day and Night do change their More and Less,
And Day is More, I saw the melting Dark
Stir to the last, and knew she laboured on.

ENGLAND.

[From Balder.]

This dear English land!

This happy England, loud with brooks and birds,

Shining with harvests, cool with dewy trees

And bloomed from hill to dell; but whose best flowers

Are daughters, and Ophelia still more fair

Than any rose she weaves; whose noblest floods

The pulsing torrent of a nation's heart;

Whose forests stronger than her native oaks

Are living men; and whose unfathomed lakes

For ever calm the unforgotten dead

In quiet graveyards willowed seemly round,
O'er which To-day bends sad, and sees his face.
Whose rocks are rights, consolidate of old

Through unremembered years, around whose base
The ever-surging peoples roll and roar

Perpetual, as around her cliffs the seas

That only wash them whiter; and whose mountains

Souls that from this mere footing of the earth
Lift their great virtues thro' all clouds of Fate
Up to the very heavens, and make them rise
To keep the gods above us!

CHAMOUNI.

If

Thou hast known anywhere amid a storm

Of thunder, when the Heavens and Earth were moved, A gleam of quiet sunshine that hath saved

Thine heart; or where the earthquake hath made wreck, Knowest a stream, that wandereth fair and sweet

As brooks go singing thro' the fields of home;

Or on a sudden when the sea, distent

With windy pride, upriseth thro' the clouds
To set his great head equal with the stars,
Hast sunk Hell-deep, thy noble ship a straw
Betwixt two billows; or in any wild

Barbaric, hast, with half-drawn breath, passed by
The sleeping savage, dreadful still in sleep,
Scarred by a thousand combats, by his side
His rugged spouse-in aught but sex a chief—
Their babe between; or where the stark roof-tree
Of a burnt home blackened and sear lies dark,
Betwixt the gaunt-ribbed ruin, hast thou seen
The rose of peace; or in some donjon deep,
Rent by a giant in the blasted rock
And proof against his peers,-hast thou beheld
Prone in the gloom, naked and shining sad
In her own light of loveliness, a fair
Daughter of Eve: Then as thou seest God
In some material likeness, less and more,
Thou hast seen Chamouni, 'mid sternest Alps
The gentlest valley; bright meandering track
Of summer when she winds among the snows
From Land to Land.

JAMES THOMSON.

[JAMES THOMSON, whose father was a seafaring man, was born at Port Glasgow on the 23rd November, 1834. His early career had many vicissitudes. Educated at the Royal Caledonian Asylum, he subsequently entered the Training School, Chelsea, for the purpose of eventually becoming an army schoolmaster. We next find him in a solicitor's office in London; then in America as secretary to a silver mine company; then in Spain as correspondent of the New York World. His first volume, The City of Dreadful Night, and other Poems, some parts of which had previously appeared in The National Reformer, was published in 1880. This was succeeded, in 1881, by Vane's Story, and other Poems. In the same year a volume of prose essays proceeded from his pen; and besides these he has left behind him many posthumous poems and translations. He died June 3rd, 1882.]

James Thomson, though his works were few and his death comparatively early, was still one of the remarkable poets of this century. Most of the poets of our time have flirted with pessimism, but through their beautifully expressed sorrow we cannot help seeing that on the whole they are less sad than they seem, or that, like Mr. Matthew Arnold, they have laid hold of a stern kind of philosophic consolation. It was reserved for Thomson to write the real poem of despair; it was for him to say the ultimate word about melancholia: for, of course, it is the result of that disorder which is depicted in The City of Dreadful Night. It was for him to gauge its horrible shapes, to understand its revelations of darkness, as Shelley and others have understood revelations of light. As soon as we have read the opening pages of The City of Dreadful Night, we feel transported to a land of infinite tragedy. It has been contended that because life itself is so tragic, such poems as Thomson's are worse than needless; but the true reason for the existence of this particular poem is given by its author in the following lines :

'Yes, here and there some weary wanderer

In that same city of tremendous night,
Will understand the speech, and feel a stir
Of fellowship in all-disastrous fight;

"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.