asses--form a very welcome relief to the somewhat ordinary
movement of the blank verse, and suggest to us again where Miss
Robinson's real power lies. Not a poet in the true creative sense, she
is still a very perfect artist in poetry, using language as one might use
a very precious material, and producing her best work by the rejection of
the great themes and large intellectual motives that belong to fuller and
richer song. When she essays such themes, she certainly fails. Her
instrument is the reed, not the lyre. Only those should sing of Death
whose song is stronger than Death is.

* * * * *

The collected poems of the author of John Halifax, Gentleman, have a
pathetic interest as the artistic record of a very gracious and comely
life. They bring us back to the days when Philip Bourke Marston was
young--'Philip, my King,' as she called him in the pretty poem of that
name; to the days of the Great Exhibition, with the universal piping
about peace; to those later terrible Crimean days, when Alma and
Balaclava were words on the lips of our poets; and to days when Leonora
was considered a very romantic name.

Leonora, Leonora,
How the word rolls--Leonora.
Lion-like in full-mouthed sound,
Marching o'er the metric ground,
With a tawny tread sublime.
So your name moves, Leonora,
Down my desert rhyme.

Mrs. Craik's best poems are, on the whole, those that are written in
blank verse; and these, though not prosaic, remind one that prose was her
true medium of expression. But some of the rhymed poems have
considerable merit. These may serve as examples of Mrs. Craik's style:

A SKETCH

Dost thou thus love me, O thou all beloved,
In whose large store the very meanest coin
Would out-buy my whole wealth? Yet here thou comest
Like a kind heiress from her purple and down
Uprising, who for pity cannot sleep,
But goes forth to the stranger at her gate--
The beggared stranger at her beauteous gate--
And clothes and feeds; scarce blest till she has blest.

But dost thou love me, O thou pure of heart,
Whose very looks are prayers? What couldst thou see
In this forsaken pool by the yew-wood's side,
To sit down at its bank, and dip thy hand,
Saying, 'It is so clear!'--and lo! ere long,
Its blackness caught the shimmer of thy wings,
Its slimes slid downward from thy stainless palm,
Its depths grew still, that there thy form might rise.

THE