e to a certain degree, but
it is only "fair to middling" Tennysonian work. We find in it not a
passage that stirs us, not one that charms. It puts the story of the
Norman Conquest of England into a dramatic form and into good blank
verse, with sound and sensible treatment of the subject, and that is
all. Its author's good taste, and above all his experience, his
dexterity, acquired by such long practice, are manifest on every page;
but there is little more. He dedicates it to the present Lord Lytton, in
evident desire to wipe out the memory of the old feud between him and
Bulwer Lytton; but that was too black and too bitter to be sponged away
with a little sugar and water.

--Mr. Latham Cornell Strong is modest in his preface about his
collection of verse,[32] although he is rather too elaborately
metaphorical in his way of blushing properly. He says, as to the flaws
in his poems, that he "has a reasonable confidence that they will not
all be discovered by any one reader." This may be true from the probable
fact that no one reader will read them all; we think that we have met
with enough of them to show that Mr. Strong might well have refrained
himself from publication. For example, we think that a true poet could
hardly have written many such passages as these, and there are many such
in the volume:

The night is rising from the trees,
Her _hands_, uplifted, _trail_ with stars

The moon hath flung _its banners_ on the sward

Old Rupert named, _alone of all the rest_
She most esteemed, for he had brought her flowers,
To wreathe her tresses and make manifest
His sympathy for her, _in many ways expressed_

The last four lines unite incorrectness, tameness, and inelegance with
remarkable and fatal facility.

FOOTNOTES:

[12] "_The Theistic Conception of the World._ An Essay in Opposition to
Certain Tendencies of Modern Thought." By B. F. COCKER, D.D., LL.D. New
York: Harper & Brothers.

[13] "_Religion and the State_; or, The Bible and the Public Schools."
By SAMUEL T. SPEAR, D.D. 12mo, pp. 393. New York: Dodd, Mead & Co.

[14] "_A Complete Life of General George A. Custer_," etc. By F.
WHITTAKER, Brevet Captain Sixth N. Y. V. Cavalry. New York: Sheldon &
Co.

[15] "_The Lord's Land_: A Narrative of Travels in Sinai, Arabia,
Petraea, and Palestine, from the Red Sea to the Entering in of Hamath."
By HENRY B. RIDGAWAY, D.D. New York: Nelson & Phillips.

[16] "_New Mexico and