(1) Memoirs of an Arabian Princess.  By the Princess Emily Ruete of Oman and Zanzibar. (Ward and Downey.)

(2) Makers of Venice.  By Mrs. Oliphant. (Macmillan and Co.)

(3) The Plan of Campaign.  By Mabel Robinson. (Vizetelly and Co.)

(4) A Year in Eden.  By Harriet Waters Preston. (Fisher Unwin.)

(5) The Englishwoman’s Year-Book, 1888. (Hatchards.)

(6) Rachel and Other Poems. (Cornish Brothers.)

THE POETS’ CORNER—­VI

(Pall Mall Gazette, April 6, 1888.)

David Westren, by Mr. Alfred Hayes, is a long narrative poem in Tennysonian blank verse, a sort of serious novel set to music.  It is somewhat lacking in actuality, and the picturesque style in which it is written rather contributes to this effect, lending the story beauty but robbing it of truth.  Still, it is not without power, and cultured verse is certainly a pleasanter medium for story-telling than coarse and common prose.  The hero of the poem is a young clergyman of the muscular Christian school: 

   A lover of good cheer; a bubbling source
   Of jest and tale; a monarch of the gun;
   A dreader tyrant of the darting trout
   Than that bright bird whose azure lightning threads
   The brooklet’s bowery windings; the red fox
   Did well to seek the boulder-strewn hill-side,
   When Westren cheered her dappled foes; the otter
   Had cause to rue the dawn when Westren’s form
   Loomed through the streaming bracken, to waylay
   Her late return from plunder, the rough pack
   Barking a jealous welcome round their friend.

One day he meets on the river a lovely girl who is angling, and helps her to land

   A gallant fish, all flashing in the sun
   In silver mail inlaid with scarlet gems,
   His back thick-sprinkled as a leopard’s hide
   With rich brown spots, and belly of bright gold.

They naturally fall in love with each other and marry, and for many years David Westren leads a perfectly happy life.  Suddenly calamity comes upon him, his wife and children die and he finds himself alone and desolate.  Then begins his struggle.  Like Job, he cries out against the injustice of things, and his own personal sorrow makes him realise the sorrow and misery of the world.  But the answer that satisfied Job does not satisfy him.  He finds no comfort in contemplating Leviathan: 

   As if we lacked reminding of brute force,
   As if we never felt the clumsy hoof,
   As if the bulk of twenty million whales
   Were worth one pleading soul, or all the laws
   That rule the lifeless suns could soothe the sense
   Of outrage in a loving human heart! 
   Sublime? majestic?  Ay, but when our trust
   Totters, and faith is shattered to the base,
   Grand words will not uprear it.