"And 'From the Earth a Cry,' this line:—
"'God purifies slowly by peace, and urgently by fire.'
" From 'The Statues in the Block':—
"'And I know
That when God gives to us the clearest sight,
He does not touch our eyes with Love, but Sorrow.'"
From The New York World.
"Nobody can look over Mr. O'Reilly's poems without being convinced that they are poems; that is to say, that the writer has really something to say, and something which could not be said so well or so completely in prose. Those who are in the habit of looking over current volumes of verse will recognize that this is very much to say of them. Mr. O'Reilly's verses are, indeed, quite out of the common. There is not one of the poems in this thin volume that is not a genuine poem in the sense that it records a genuine and poetical impression. His talent is essentially, we should say almost exclusively, dramatic, as strictly dramatic as Browning's. The most successful of these poems are those which are professedly dramatic rather than those which are contemplative. This excellence in dramatic verse is national. From Thomas Davis down, the Irish lyrists, who are worthy of classification at all in poetry, excel in representation of rapid action and of the emotion which is connected with rapid action; and this is what we call dramatic excellence. Mr. O'Reilly's chief successes are in such poems as 'A Song for the Soldiers,' and 'The Mutiny of the Chains,' in the present volume."
Newark (N. J,) Morning Register.
"Roberts Brothers, Boston, have just published 'The Statues in the Block, and Other Poems,' by John Boyle O'Reilly. The poem that gives the book its title is the story of four persons looking at a block of marble and seeing an ideal in it. One, her he loved, his jewel, and the jewel of the world. Another, her upon whom he lavished coin—he drank the wine she filled and
