Page:Athletics and Manly Sport (1890).djvu/540

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THE STATUES IN THE BLOCK.
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inner relation to actual experience in the narrator, which so intensifies the interest. The first is a lovely woman:—

"'O Love! still living, memory and hope,
Beyond all sweets, thy bosom, breath and lips—
My jewel and the jewel of the world.'"

"The second, a faithless woman, cowering ahove the form of her newly-slain paramour:—

"'O balm and torture ! he must hate who loves,
And bleed who strikes to seek thy face, Revenge.'


"The third a chained woman—Mother and Motherland:—

"O star.
That lightens desolation, o'er her beam,
. . . Till the dawn is red
Of that white noon when men shall call her Queen.'

"The fourth is a figure of a dead child:—

"'I know
That when God gives to us the clearest sight
He does not touch our eyes with Love, but Sorrow.'

"In 'Muley Malek, the King,' Mr. O'Reilly bursts over the bounds of metre; but in the swing of his utterance there is a certain forceful rhythm, indicating an earnest endeavor to preserve some of the characteristics of song. In 'From the Earth a Cry,' however, all reserve is thrown off, and he launches formlessly forth. Walt Whitman chopped up Carlylesque sentences into lines at hazard, but rapidly debased the model. Mr. O'Reilly takes a high strident key, and follows Whitman's most ambitious endeavors. It is an eloquent invective, and its fitfulness and spasmodics have a certain relation to its grievous story of human oppression. It is as formless and as forcible as the onrushing mob it invokes. All that is, is wrong; what need of nice measuring of feet? It is not the measured tramp of an array that can be expected where the undisciplined millions rise to bear down drilled thousands.

"'O Christ! and O Christ! In thy name the law!
In Thy mouth the mandate! In Thy loving hands the whip!
They have taken Thee down from Thy cross and sent Thee to scourge the people;