Remembrance, though the tide of change that rolls
Wax hoary,
Gives earth and heaven, for song's sake and the soul's,
Their glory.

Certainly, 'for song's sake' we should love Mr. Swinburne's work, cannot,
indeed, help loving it, so marvellous a music-maker is he. But what of
the soul? For the soul we must go elsewhere.

Poems and Ballads. Third Series. By Algernon Charles Swinburne. (Chatto
and Windus.)

THREE NEW POETS

(Pall Mall Gazette, July 12, 1889.)

Books of poetry by young writers are usually promissory notes that are
never met. Now and then, however, one comes across a volume that is so
far above the average that one can hardly resist the fascinating
temptation of recklessly prophesying a fine future for its author. Such
a book Mr. Yeats's Wanderings of Oisin certainly is. Here we find
nobility of treatment and nobility of subject-matter, delicacy of poetic
instinct and richness of imaginative resource. Unequal and uneven much
of the work must be admitted to be. Mr. Yeats does not try to 'out-baby'
Wordsworth, we are glad to say; but he occasionally succeeds in
'out-glittering' Keats, and, here and there, in his book we come across
strange crudities and irritating conceits. But when he is at his best he
is very good. If he has not the grand simplicity of epic treatment, he
has at least something of the largeness of vision that belongs to the
epical temper. He does not rob of their stature the great heroes of
Celtic mythology. He is very naive and very primitive and speaks of his
giants with the air of a child. Here is a characteristic passage from
the account of Oisin's return from the Island of Forgetfulness:

And I rode by the plains of the sea's edge, where all is barren and
grey,
Grey sands on the green of the grasses and over the dripping trees,
Dripping and doubling landward, as though they would hasten away
Like an army of old men longing for rest from the moan of the seas.

Long fled the foam-flakes around me, the winds fled out of the vast,
Snatching the bird in secret, nor knew I, embosomed apart,
When they froze the cloth on my body like armour riveted fast,
For Remembrance, lifting her leanness, keened in the gates of my
heart.

Till fattening the winds of the morning, an odour of new-mown hay
Came, and my forehead fell low, and my tears like berries fell down;
Later a sound came, half lost in the sound of a