redundant for modern readers. Such striking passages as the following, however, do much to relieve the monotony:—
At Sorrow's door I knocked, they craved my name:
I answered, one unworthy to be known.
What one? say they. One worthiest of blame.
But who? A wretch, not God's nor yet his own.
A man? Oh no! a beast; much worse. What creature?
A rock. How called? The rock of scandal, Peter!
Throughout his shorter poems Father Southwell shows to truer advantage. It was inevitable that the minor notes of life should have struck deepest echo in our poet's heart. Their very titles, Scorn Not the Least, Life is but Loss, What Joy to Live? etc., carry a message which those that run may read. But their sadness is utterly without bitterness or pessimism, their weariness of life always presses on to a hope beyond. A few lines from Times go by Turns will serve to illustrate the beauty, even the cheerfulness, of his thought:—
Not always fall of leaf, nor ever spring,
No endless night, yet not eternal day;
The saddest birds a season find to sing,
The roughest storm a calm may soon allay;
Thus with succeeding turns God tempereth all,
That man may hope to rise, yet fear to fall.
But the most masterful of Father Southwell's lyrics—the lyric, indeed, to claim which Drummond of Hawthornden tells us Ben Jonson would willingly have destroyed more than one of his own poems,—is the famous
BURNING-BABE.
As I in hoary winter's night stood shivering in the snow,
