w a noble-looking maiden
Close Dante's solemn book,
And go, with crate of linen laden
And wash it in the brook.

Anon, a broad-browed _poet, dragging
A load of logs along_,
To warm his hearth, withal not flagging
In current of his song.

Each one some handicraft attempted
Or helped to till the soil:
None but the aged were exempted
From communistic toil.

Such an expression as 'coarse suspicion of marriage' is not very
fortunate; the log-rolling poet of the fifth stanza is an ideal that we
have already realised and one in which we had but little comfort, and the
fourth stanza leaves us in doubt whether Mr. Austin means that
washerwomen are to take to reading Dante, or that students of Italian
literature are to wash their own clothes. But, on the whole, though Mr.
Austin's vision of the citta divina of the future is not very
inspiriting, it is certainly extremely interesting as a sign of the
times, and it is evident from the two concluding lines of the following
stanzas that there will be no danger of the intellect being overworked:

Age lorded not, nor rose the hectic
Up to the cheek of youth;
But reigned throughout their dialectic
Sobriety of truth.

And if a long-held contest tended
To ill-defined result,
_It was by calm consent suspended
As over-difficult_.

Mr. Austin, however, has other moods, and, perhaps, he is at his best
when he is writing about flowers. Occasionally he wearies the reader by
tedious enumerations of plants, lacking indeed reticence and tact and
selection in many of his descriptions, but, as a rule, he is very
pleasant when he is babbling of green fields. How pretty these stanzas
from the dedication are!

When vines, just newly burgeoned, link
Their hands to join the dance of Spring,
Green lizards glisten from cleft and chink,
And almond blossoms rosy pink
Cluster and perch, ere taking wing;

Where over strips of emerald wheat
Glimmer red peach and snowy pear,
And nightingales all day long repeat
Their love-song, not less glad than sweet
They chant in sorrow and gloom elsewhere;

Where purple iris-banners scale
Defending walls and crumbling ledge,
And virgin windflowers, lithe and frail,
Now mantling red, now trembling pale,
Peep out from furrow and hide in hedge.

Some of the sonnets also (notably, one entitled When Acorns