cellent maps of the Texas and Mexican battles are found in the other volume; but a few good general maps, covering the whole field of military movements described, would add to the reader's interest and profit. The volumes are well indexed.
Recent Books of Poetry.[1]
It seems odd to begin an article upon "Recent Books of Poetry" with a paragraph devoted to "Poems by Two Brothers." That modest collection of youthful exercises in verse, now reproduced (as to title-page and arrangement) in fac-simile, is mainly useful in enabling us to realize the immense range of the conquests of Victorian Poetry. The year of its publication (1827 ) was also that of the appearance of Pollok's "Course of Time," marking the lowest ebb of the tide of dull eighteenth-century didacticism. Meanwhile, the romantic movement had swelled to its height, and its force was fast becoming spent. But who could have discerned, in the volume almost furtively put forth by three English schoolboys (for Mr. Frederick Tennyson wrote at least four of the poems), the first wave of a new tide of song, about to gather to itself the best impulses of both the didactic and romantic spirits, to unite them in one resistless surge, and destined to sweep down the century almost to its very close. Even now, when judgment can hardly avoid the influence of the accomplished fact, it is difficult to find in this volume any suggestion, much less any promise, of what was to come. Here and there we find a faintly Tennysonian phrase, such as
"Groves of undulating pine,
Upon whose heads the hoary vapours hung,"
or this:
"The thunder of the brazen prows
O'er Actium's ocean rang,"
or this:
"A wan, dull, lengthen'd sheet of swimming light
Lies the broad lake."
But what we find for the most part are the platitudes of boyish rhetoric, and echoes of Byron or Moore. It is amusing to think that any work signed by Alfred Tennyson should deserve no better description than is given by the phrase, "an echo of Moore." Four pieces not included in the original edition are now first published from manuscript. They enrich English literature by such measures as this:
"Fare thee well! for I am parting
To the realms of endless bliss;
Why is thus thy full tear starting?
There's a world more bright than this."
"Timbuctoo," the prize poem of 1829, which the publishers have also added to the collection, is a different matter. Here we can find our own Tennyson in many passages. The following has often been quoted, but is worth quoting again:
"The clear galaxy
Shorn of its hoary lustre, wonderful,
Distinct and vivid with sharp points of light,
Blaze within blaze, an unimagin'd depth
And harmony of planet-girded suns
And moon-encircled planets, wheel in wheel,
Arch'd the wan sapphire."
Indeed, the growth in power of poetic expression that is evidenced by these and many other lines of "Timbuctoo," when compared with the best of the "Poems by Two Brothers," is one of the most striking things in all the record of the development of poetical genius.
"King Poppy," a posthumous poem by the Earl of Lytton, was written nearly twenty years ago, and subjected, during the rest of the author's lifetime, to constant revision and improvement. It was the author's favorite work, and exhibits, at their highest stage of development, his considerable powers as a writer of philosophic and fanciful verse. In 1880, he wrote of the poem to this effect:
"The purpose of it, so far as it has any definite purpose, is not to prove that all is vanity, but to suggest what a poor tissue of unreality human life would be if the much despised influence of the imagination were banished from it. I think that the practical tendency of all the most popular formulas of social and political improvement is to exclude the imaginative element from the development of character and society, and to ignore its influence. . . . Holding this view, it was a relief to me to write 'King Poppy,' and a sort of whimsical enjoyment to contemplate my own image of the perfection of government conducted by a puppet. Apart from this, the more purely literary idea I had in this poem was to shape out vaguely a sort of Golden Legend from the most venerable and familiar features or fragments of the fairy tales and ballads which float about the world, and which our wise generation relegates to the nursery."
- ↑
- Poems by Two Brothers. New York: Macmillan & Co.
- King Poppy. By the Earl of Lytton. New York: Longmans, Green, & Co.
- The Eloping Angels: A Caprice. By William Watson. New York: Macmillan & Co.
- Old John, and Other Poems. By T. E. Brown. New York: Macmillan & Co.
- El Nuevo Mundo: A Poem. By Louis James Block. Chicago: C. H. Kerr & Co.
- Songs of Doubt and Dream. By Edgar Fawcett. New York: Funk & Wagnalls Co.
- Red Leaves and Roses. By Madison Cawein. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons.
- Under the Scarlet and Black: Poems by Undergraduates of Iowa College. Edited by Henry S. McCowan and Frank F. Everest. Grinnell: Herald Publishing Co.
- Cap and Gown: Some College Verse. Chosen by Joseph La Roy Harrison. Boston: Joseph Knight Co.
- Under King Constantine. New York: A. D. F. Randolph & Co.
- Seaward: An Elegy on the Death of Thomas William Parsons. By Richard Hovey. Boston: D. Lothrop Co.
- Greek Poets in English Verse. By Various Translators. Edited by William Hyde Appleton. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin & Co.
- Horatian Echoes: Translations of the Odes of Horace. By John Osborne Sargent. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin & Co.
- The Æneid of Vergil, Books I.—VI. Translated into English Verse by James Rhoades. New York: Longmans, Green, & Co.
- The Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Edited by James Dykes Campbell. New York: Macmillan & Co.
