st,
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 shore far away,
From the great grass-barnacle calling, and later the shore-winds
brown.

If I were as I once was, the gold hooves crushing the sand and the
shells,
Coming forth from the sea like the morning with red lips murmuring
a song,
Not coughing, my head on my knees, and praying, and wroth with the
bells,
I would leave no Saint's head on his body, though spacious his
lands were and strong.

Making way from the kindling surges, I rode on a bridle-path,
Much wondering to see upon all hands, of wattle and woodwork made,
Thy bell-mounted churches, and guardless the sacred cairn and the
earth,
And a small and feeble populace stooping with mattock and spade.

In one or two places the music is faulty, the construction is sometimes
too involved, and the word 'populace' in the last line is rather
infelicitous; but, when all is said, it is impossible not to feel in
these stanzas the presence of the true poetic spirit.

_The Wanderings of Oisin and other Poems_. By W. B. Yeats. (Kegan
Paul.)

MR. WILLIAM MORRIS'S LAST BOOK
(_Pall Mall Gazette_, March 2, 1889.)

Mr. Morris's last book is a piece of pure art workmanship from beginning
to end, and the very remoteness of its style from the common language and
ordinary interests of our day gives to the whole story a strange beauty
and an unfamiliar charm. It is written in blended prose and verse, like
the mediaeval 'cante-fable,' and tells the tale of the House of the
Wolfings in its struggles against the legionaries of Rome then advancing
into Northern Germany. It is a kind of Saga, and the language in which
the folk-epic, as we may call it, is set forth recalls the antique
dignity and directness of our English tongue four centuries ago. From an
artistic point of view it may be described as an attempt to return by a
self-conscious effort to the conditions of an earlier and a fresher age.
Attempts of this kind are not uncommon in the history of art. From some
such