many graceful verses and pleasant snatches of song in Mr Owen Meredith's early hours of idleness. Let us instance such a pretty cabinet picture, warmly framed and perfect, as the following:

"My little love, do you remember,

Ere we were grown so sadly wise, Those evenings in the bleak December, Curtained warm from the snowy weather, When you and I played chess together, Checkmated by each other's eyes?

Ah, still I see your soft white hand, Hovering warm o'er Queen and Knight, Brave Pawns in valiant battle stand; The double Castles guard the wings, The Bishop bent on distant things, Moves sidling through the fight.

Our fingers touch; our glances meet, And falter; falls your golden hair Against my cheek; your bosom sweet Is heaving. Down the field your Queen Rides slow, her soldiery all between,

And checks me unaware.

Ah me! the little battle's done,
Disperst is all its chivalry.
Full many a move since then have we
'Mid life's perplexing chequers made,
And many a game with fortune played.
What is it we have won?

This, this at least, if this alone,
That never, never, never more,
As in those old still nights of yore

(Ere we were grown so sadly wise),
Can you and I shut out the skies,
Shut out the world and wintry weather;
And, eyes exchanging warmth with eyes,
Play chess as then we played together."

And here is something which rings

like real metal

"Yet I am a part of the things I despise, Since my life is bound by their common span;

And each idler I meet in square or street, Hath within him what all that's without him belies,

The miraculous, infinite heart of man, With its countless capabilities! The sleekest guest at the general feast,

That at every sip, as he sups, says grace, Hath in him a touch of the untamed beast, And change of nature is change of place. The judge on the bench, and the scamp in the dock,

Have in each of them much that is common to both:

Each is part of the parent stock,

And their difference comes of their dif

ferent cloth.

Is the hero now heard cf, the first on the

wall,

With the bayonet-wound in his side.

I know that all acted time, By that which succeeds it is ever received, As calmer, completer, and more sublime, Only because it is finished-because We only behold the thing it achievedWe behold not the thing it was.

Who knows how sculptor on sculptor starved,

With the thought in the head by the hand uncarved?

And he that spread out in its ample repose,

That grand, indifferent, godlike brow, How vainly his own may have ached, who knows,

'Twixt the laurel above and the wrinkle below?

Oh Lord of the soul of man, whose will
Made earth for man, and man for heaven,
Help all thy creatures to fulfil

The hopes to each one given !
So fair thou mad'st, and so complete
The little daisies at our feet;

So sound and so robust in heart,
The patient beasts that bear their part;
In this world's labour never asking
The reason of its ceaseless tasking.
Hast thou made man, though more in kind,
By reason of his soul and mind;
Yet less in unison with life,
By reason of an inward strife,
Than these, thy simpler creatures, are?"

This last is better for its thoughts than its execution, which is a fault on the right side-execution without thought being the kind of production from which this young poet and the young world which he represents has most to fear. It is true that a power of execution in this day means rather a faculty for rough verses and irregular measure than for the smooth and polished diction of old; but it may very well happen that the rude rhythm takes a world of trouble, and is a delusion and snare more potent than even the liquid flow of words which made music to the ears of our fathers. In the volume called The Wanderer, there are some apparent * intentions of conveying a subtle thread of story out of one short poem into another, as has been done in Mr Tennyson's Maud; but we cannot affirm that they have been successful. Mr Owen Meredith, however, can tell a story; and this gift he

manifests, not only in the little classic drama of Clytemnestra, which, notwithsanding many vigorous and picturesque passages, belongs to the Newdegate school of poetry; but also in the modern tale, with which he has followed the example of his greater contemporaries for, not content with the verses, he has put forth his strength in one sustained effort, and the result is another novel in verse-the story of Lucile.*

Again a French plan and subjectagain another example of that popular superiority to English ideas of life and love which has begun to steal upon young English literature. Lucile is that favourite heroine of French romance, a beautiful widow; wonderfully superior to the follies of fashion, and with touching evidences of a broken heart in her looks and behaviour, she is yet angelically present at various haunts of fashion, where she does much unintentional mischief and some good. She has, of course, two lovers, one of whom, hopeless himself, satisfies his revengeful feelings by deceiving and sending off the other. After an interval, when the deceived lover has married, the whole party meet at Ems, where Lucile defeats her rejected and vindictive suitor in a second attempt to injure the happiness of his former rival, and helps to establish a thorough understanding between the husband and wife. With these events the greater part of the story is filled. It is thoroughly conventional, the whole plan and construction of the tale being familiar to all experienced romance-readers, who are of course perfectly prepared to know that Lucile after this becomes a Sister of Charity, and is at last the means of bringing about a happy marriage between the children of those rivals for her own love. But many an excellent story is made out of the same conventional materials, and we do not quarrel with our author on that score, for there is abundant vigour and rapidity in the narrative, and much picturesque and lifelike description. Neither do we upbraid Mr Owen Meredith for having a philanthropic bankrupt and a

lost fortune among the accessories of his drama, as everybody else has at the present moment. The fact has been so sadly common, and its results contain so much rich and neverfailing material, that one cannot wonder if it is very readily received into the repertory of the romancewriter, whether he writes in prose or verse. Mrs Browning's Romney Leigh loses his sight in a fire, exactly as Jane Eyre's Rochester and various other heroes who had the luck to come after that first unfortunate gentleman have done. It is too much to demand originality of incident. But we have infinitely greater objections to the French character of the heroine than to the French name, which plays such pranks, as the author confesses, with English rhymes. The brilliant French widow is as much contrary to the genius of English romance, as she who "wears a chain" is to the love-sonnets of English poetry. These materials are alien and foreign to us, and convey a certain disrespect to the traditions of our language and literature, which is not excusable in a young writer, and which of course he must expect to impair the reputation of his book. This is quite a fundamental blunder, and worthy of all censure. Besides, if Mr Meredith's Lucile was such a person as he calls her, what had she to do in that public room at Ems, being heartbroken, and lonely, and disgusted with the world? Had they all been carried by a sudden tour de force to some mysterious chateau, where the lady lived in seclusion, we could have forgiven the stratagem; but what had such a person to do at a German bath? We repeat, like the oracle, who, for that once at least, was doubtless mistaken-this will never do! No-not if Mr Owen Meredith turned out another Wordsworth. It is possible enough to bear with a blue woman once in a way, instead of our English rosebud heroine, of whom we are never tired; but we set our face against the importation of the French widow into our tender fields and dewy landscapes. She is very charming, but we have nothing to do with her. Let us open.

VOL. LXXXVIII.-NO. DXXXVII.

D

the door for Madame, and bow her out to her carriage. We admire her sentiments and her toilette at a respectful distance, but she does not belong to us-never did, and never shall.

Having entered which protest for the benefit of all those young cultivators of literature who are contemptuous of our good English fashions of love-making, and of the maiden heroine of the same, we do not object to return to the book before us, where the story, despite the trammels of verse, moves lightly and not too slow, and where the scene and landscape are picturesque and true. Here is the coming on and dispersion of a mountain-storm :

And shivering pine-trees, like phantoms To waver above in the dark and yon stream,

How it hurries and roars on its way to the white

And paralysed lake there, appalled at the sight

Of the things seen in heaven.

Of rockwork. Thus left to its own desolation,

The lake, from whose glimmering limits the last

Transient pomp of the pageants of sunset had passed,

Drew into its bosom the darkness, and only

Admitted within it one image-a lonely And tremulous phantom of flickering light, That followed the mystical moon through the night."

And here a hurried night-ride through the same scenery :

A dull sense of strangeness, about to turn back

wave,

And the crickets that sing all the night. She stood still,

Vaguely watching the thin cloud that curled on the hill.

Ah, pale woman! what, with that heartbroken look,

Didst thou read there in nature's weird heartbreaking book?

Have the wild rains of heaven a father? and who

Hath in pity begotten the drops of the dew?

Orion, Arcturus, who pilots them both? What leads forth in his season the bright Mazeroth?

Hath the darkness a dwelling save there in those eyes?

And what name hath that half revealed hope in the skies?

Ay, question and listen! What answer? The sound

Of the long river-wave through its stonetroubled bound,

And the crickets that sing all the night."

From these extracts our readers will see that there is no small amount of force and vitality, as well as skill, in the craft of verse-making to be found in Lucile. We spare the dialogues; sad examples of what the poor muse is driven to in the conduct of a modern tale : poetry, of course, it is impossible to call these snatchy conversations put into rhyme; but they are cleverly done notwithstanding. The rhymes themselves, however, are not quite so carefully looked to as they might have been, and even in the full swing of narrative the reader is brought up

less track,

the road: hers does not rhyme well to characters; the effect of the emphasis on the last syllable of a long word-an experiment which the author of Lucile seems fond of trying

unfortunately, is not always successful, and we fear to whisper how often we have stumbled upon the jingle of furl'd and world, which seems a favourite combination. This is not a lack of power, but a lack of that which Carlyle describes as one of the supreme faculties of genius