Bush-boy alone by my side:
Away, away, from the dwelling of men
By the wild-deer's haunt, by the buffalo's glen:
By valleys remote where the oribi plays,
Where the gnu, the gazelle and the hartebeest graze,
And the kudu and eland unhunted recline
By the skirts of grey forests o'erhung with wild vine,
Where the elephant browses at peace in his wood,
And the river-horse gambols unscared in the flood,
And the mighty rhinoceros wallows at will
In the fen where the wild ass is drinking his fill.

It is not, however, a very remarkable production.

The Smouse, by Fannin, has the modern merit of incomprehensibility. It
reads like something out of The Hunting of the Snark:

I'm a Smouse, I'm a Smouse in the wilderness wide,
The veld is my home, and the wagon's my pride:
The crack of my 'voerslag' shall sound o'er the lea,
I'm a Smouse, I'm a Smouse, and the trader is free!
I heed not the Governor, I fear not his law,
I care not for civilisation one straw,
And ne'er to 'Ompanda'--'Umgazis' I'll throw
While my arm carries fist, or my foot bears a toe!
'Trek,' 'trek,' ply the whip--touch the fore oxen's skin,
I'll warrant we'll 'go it' through thick and through thin--
Loop! loop ye oud skellums! ot Vikmaan trek jy;
I'm a Smouse, I'm a Smouse, and the trader is free!

The South African poets, as a class, are rather behind the age. They
seem to think that 'Aurora' is a very novel and delightful epithet for
the dawn. On the whole they depress us.

Chess, by Mr. Louis Tylor, is a sort of Christmas masque in which the
dramatis personae consist of some unmusical carollers, a priggish young
man called Eric, and the chessmen off the board. The White Queen's
Knight begins a ballad and the Black King's Bishop completes it. The
Pawns sing in chorus and the Castles converse with each other. The
silliness of the form makes it an absolutely unreadable book.

Mr. Williamson's Poems of Nature and Life are as orthodox in spirit as
they are commonplace in form. A few harmless heresies of art and thought
would do this poet no harm. Nearly everything that he says has been said
before and said better. The only original thing in the volume is the
description of Mr. Robert Buchanan's 'grandeur of mind.' This is
decidedly new.

Dr. Cockle tells us that Mullner's Guilt and The Ancestress of
Grillparzer are the masterpieces of German fate-tragedy. His translation
of th