The priest he lifted his ain right hand,
      And the red blood dripped and fell. 
   Says, ’I loved ye, lady, and ye loved me;
      Sae I took your life mysel’.’

. . . . .

   Oh! red, red was the dawn o’ day,
      And tall was the gallows-tree: 
   The Southland lord to his ain has fled
      And the mess-priest’s hangit hie!

Of the sonnets, this To Herodotus is worth quoting: 

   Far-travelled coaster of the midland seas,
      What marvels did those curious eyes behold! 
      Winged snakes, and carven labyrinths of old;
   The emerald column raised to Heracles;
   King Perseus’ shrine upon the Chemmian leas;
      Four-footed fishes, decked with gems and gold: 
      But thou didst leave some secrets yet untold,
   And veiled the dread Osirian mysteries.

   And now the golden asphodels among
      Thy footsteps fare, and to the lordly dead
      Thou tellest all the stories left unsaid
   Of secret rites and runes forgotten long,
      Of that dark folk who ate the Lotus-bread
   And sang the melancholy Linus-song.

Mrs. Tomson has certainly a very refined sense of form.  Her verse, especially in the series entitled New Words to Old Tunes, has grace and distinction.  Some of the shorter poems are, to use a phrase made classical by Mr. Pater, ‘little carved ivories of speech.’  She is one of our most artistic workers in poetry, and treats language as a fine material.

(1) An Author’s Love:  Being the Unpublished Letters of Prosper Merimee’s ‘Inconnue.’ (Macmillan and Co.)

(2) The Bird-Bride:  A Volume of Ballads and Sonnets.  By Graham R. Tomson. (Longmans, Green and Co.)

A THOUGHT-READER’S NOVEL

(Pall Mall Gazette, June 5, 1889.)

There is a great deal to be said in favour of reading a novel backwards.  The last page is, as a rule, the most interesting, and when one begins with the catastrophe or the denoument one feels on pleasant terms of equality with the author.  It is like going behind the scenes of a theatre.  One is no longer taken in, and the hairbreadth escapes of the hero and the wild agonies of the heroine leave one absolutely unmoved.  One knows the jealously-guarded secret, and one can afford to smile at the quite unnecessary anxiety that the puppets of fiction always consider it their duty to display.  In the case of Mr. Stuart Cumberland’s novel, The Vasty Deep, as he calls it, the last page is certainly thrilling and makes us curious to know more about ‘Brown, the medium.’

Scene, a padded room in a mad-house in the United States.

A gibbering lunatic discovered dashing wildly about the chamber as if in the act of chasing invisible forms.

‘This is our worst case,’ says a doctor opening the cell to one of the visitors in lunacy.  ’He was a spirit medium and he is hourly haunted by the creations of his fancy.  We have to carefully watch him, for he has developed suicidal tendencies.’