She knows us not, nor recks if she enthrall With voice and eyes and fashion of her hair, A little, passionately, not at all!

Knee-deep she goes in meadow-grasses tall, Kissed by the daisies that her fingers tear; And what care we how many petals fall!

We pass and go; but she shall not recall What men we were, nor all she made us bear; 'A little, passionately, not at all!'

And what care we how many petals fall!

A LAST WORD.

Let us go hence: the night is now at hand;
The day is overworn, the birds all flown;

And we have reaped the crops the gods have sown; Despair and death's deep darkness o'er the land

Broods like an owl; we cannot understand

Laughter or tears, for we have only known
Surpassing vanity; vain things alone
Have driven our perverse and aimless band.

Let us go hence, somewhither strange and cold,
To Hollow Lands where just men and unjust
Find end of labour, where's rest for the old,
Freedom to all from love and fear and lust.
Twine our torn hands! O pray the earth enfold
Our life-sick hearts and turn them into dust.

RICHARD MIDDLETON.

[RICHARD MIDDLETON, born 1889, died at Brussels in 1911. His work, during his life, was published in various periodicals. Three volumes of prose, The Ghost Ship, Monologues, and The Day before Yesterday, containing essays and short stories, were collected after his death. Two volumes of verse, Poems and Songs, first and second series, were also posthumously published in 1912 and 1913, by Fisher Unwin.]

The mind of a great poet is a mirror endowed with the power of collecting the diffused and broken light of experience and reverberating it in one bright focal ray of consummated expression. Good poetry is always an account of facts, whether facts of the senses, or of thought and passion and imagination. It is not a collection of vague phrases and unbodied verbiage, but a significant expression of truth. But there is also a kind of simulation poetry, which is an art of making phrases, of linking shadowy, inaccurate words into a melody. This rhetoric a gradus may teach; and by a man of talent it may be brought to a certain specious perfection, from which only time and the ravages of criticism will rub the dazzle and the gilt. At its best, the poetry of words may drug and intoxicate the senses. It can never hope to appeal to any higher faculty.

The work of Richard Middleton belongs to both these categories. Some of his writing may be classed with true poetry; some, and perhaps it is the greater part, with the sham variety. At his most inspired, he displays clarity of thought and sincere emotion, clothed in melody that is sweet, sometimes to over-ripeness. At his worst, he trusts to vaguely 'poetical' words and a copious use of not too significant images to cover the defects in the substance of his poetry. His bad verse is like a piece of music, blurred into husky sweetness by some indifferent player who relies for his effects rather on the pedal than on a clean and skilful execution. The fine intricacies of truth, which a great poet labours exactly to express, are by Middleton too often confounded and smudged into a rhetorical dimness, where outlines are lost in a welter of sensuous words.

It is not hard to find examples of Middleton's rhetorical vagueness and exuberance. His poems abound in such phrases as 'stained by the wine of our old ecstasy,' 'moonlit lilies of the past,' 'domes

of desire and secret halls of sin.' They are powdered with 'the dust of dreams,' and on their smooth tide of harmony swims many a 'dreamy ship,' many an' argosy' freighted with no poetical treasure beyond its own sonorous name. The use of words without significant content, intoxicating substitutes for thought, has been the bane of almost every mental activity. Not least has poetry suffered. Beautiful as, in its way, rhetoric may be, it is nevertheless a degraded form of poetry.

Of the earth and of the fire, earthly and fiery, Middleton's best poems are the expression of a passionate paganism. This present world is enough for us, he says, and a man may satisfy his soul with the good things of it, kisses and wine and sunlight. He bids us pluck the roses of the day, adding no philosophic caution as to the limitation of desires. In passion the extreme is the only mean, and, for him, the ideal life is one of continual passion, of unceasing and ecstatic enjoyment of the here and now. If the spirit has any thirst for the infinite, it must satisfy itself in the boundlessness of passion. He has not the vision of the mystic who looks through the beauties of this world into a divine beauty beyond them. To his eyes the things of the earth are opaque, solid, complete in themselves. They are divine, not as being symbols of some universal spirit, but because of the earth-born divinity within themselves-tutelary nymph or little goat-foot genius of the place. Passion, then, and the warm immediacy of paganism are the themes upon which Middleton works. He gives them expression in a rich voluptuous form, that is apt, as we have seen, to decay to mere verbal luxuriance.

The metrical skill displayed in all the poems is considerable, though the range of the musical effects at which Middleton aims is a narrow one. Smoothness and sweetness of numbers, melodies that will sing themselves as they run-these are the characteristics of Middleton's verse. Many of the metrical devices adapted by the nineteenth century from Elizabethan usage are to be met with in his poems. Such balanced phrases of rhythm as,

'For I have learnt too many things to live,
And I have loved too many things to die,'

illustrate the successful use of one of the most pleasing of these musical artifices.

ALDOUS HUXLEY.

THE CAROL OF THE POOR CHILDREN.

We are the poor children, come out to see the sights
On this day of all days, on this night of nights;
The stars in merry parties are dancing in the sky,
A fine star, a new star, is shining on high!

We are the poor children, our lips are frosty blue,
We cannot sing our carol as well as rich folk do;
Our bellies are so empty we have no singing voice,
But this night of all nights good children must rejoice.
We do rejoice, we do rejoice, as hard as we can try,
A fine star, a new star is shining in the sky!

And while we sing our carol, we think of the delight
The happy kings and shepherds make in Bethlehem to-night.
Are we naked, mother, and are we starving-poor-

Oh, see what gifts the kings have brought outside the stable door;
Are we cold, mother, the ass will give his hay

To make the manger warm and keep the cruel winds away.

We are the poor children, but not so poor who sing

Our carol with our voiceless hearts to greet the new-born King, On this night of all nights, when in the frosty sky

A new star, a kind star is shining on high!

VOL. V.

ANY LOVER, ANY LASS.

Why are her eyes so bright, so bright,
Why do her lips control

The kisses of a summer night,

When I would love her soul?

God set her brave eyes wide apart
And painted them with fire,
They stir the ashes of my heart

To embers of desire.

Her lips so tenderly are wrought

In so divine a shape,

That I am servant to my thought
And can nowise escape.

Rr

Her body is a flower, her hair
About her neck doth play;
I find her colours everywhere,
They are the pride of day.

Her little hands are soft, and when
I see her fingers move

I know in very truth that men
Have died for less than love.

Ah, dear, live, lovely thing! my eyes
Have sought her like a prayer ;
It is my better self that cries
'Would she were not so fair!"

Would I might forfeit ecstasy
And find a calmer place,
Where I might undesirous see
Her too desiréd face.

Nor feel her eyes so bright, so bright
Nor hear her lips unroll

Dream after dream the lifelong night,
When I would love her soul.

AUTUMNAL.

Across the scented garden of my dreams
Where roses grew, Time passes like a thief,
Among my trees his silver sickle gleams,

The grass is stained with many a ruddy leaf;
And on cold winds the petals float away
That were the pride of June and her array.

The bare boughs weave a net upon the sky

To catch Love's wings and his fair body bruise; There are no flowers in the rosary

No song-birds in the mournful avenues; Though on the sodden air not lightly breaks The elegy of Youth, whom love forsakes.