y, wilful ways, should not write Antiphons to the
Unknowable, or try to grapple with abstract intellectual problems. Hers
is not the hand to unveil mysteries, nor hers the strength for the
solving of secrets. She should never leave her garden, and as for her
wandering out into the desert to ask the Sphinx questions, that should be
sternly forbidden to her. Durer's Melancolia, that serves as the
frontispiece to this dainty book, looks sadly out of place. Her seat is
with the sibyls, not with the nymphs. What has she to do with
shepherdesses piping about Darwinism and 'The Eternal Mind'?

However, if the Songs of the Inner Life are not very successful, the
Spring Songs are delightful. They follow each other like wind-blown
petals, and make one feel how much more charming flower is than fruit,
apple-blossom than apple. There are some artistic temperaments that
should never come to maturity, that should always remain in the region of
promise and should dread autumn with its harvesting more than winter with
its frosts. Such seems to me the temperament that this volume reveals.
The first poem of the second series, La Belle au Bois Dormant, is worth
all the more serious and thoughtful work, and has far more chance of
being remembered. It is not always to high aim and lofty ambition that
the prize is given. If Daphne had gone to meet Apollo, she would never
have known what laurels are.

From these fascinating spring lyrics and idylls we pass to the romantic
ballads. One artistic faculty Miss Robinson certainly possesses--the
faculty of imitation. There is an element of imitation in all the arts;
it is to be found in literature as much as in painting, and the danger of
valuing it too little is almost as great as the danger of setting too
high a value upon it. To catch, by dainty mimicry, the very mood and
manner of antique work, and yet to retain that touch of modern passion
without which the old form would be dull and empty; to win from
long-silent lips some faint echo of their music, and to add to it a music
of one's own; to take the mode and fashion of a bygone age, and to
experiment with it, and search curiously for its possibilities; there is
a pleasure in all this. It is a kind of literary acting, and has
something of the charm of the art of the stage-player. And how well, on
the whole, Miss Robinson does it! Here is the opening of the ballad of
Rudel:

There was in all the world of France
No si