In, in, out and in,
   Blaws the wind and whirls the whin: 

The Jacobite’s Exile—­

   O lordly flow the Loire and Seine,
      And loud the dark Durance: 
   But bonnier shine the braes of Tyne
      Than a’ the fields of France;
   And the waves of Till that speak sae still
   Gleam goodlier where they glance: 

The Tyneside Widow and A Reiver’s Neck-verse are all poems of fine imaginative power, and some of them are terrible in their fierce intensity of passion.  There is no danger of English poetry narrowing itself to a form so limited as the romantic ballad in dialect.  It is of too vital a growth for that.  So we may welcome Mr. Swinburne’s masterly experiments with the hope that things which are inimitable will not be imitated.  The collection is completed by a few poems on children, some sonnets, a threnody on John William Inchbold, and a lovely lyric entitled The Interpreters.

   In human thought have all things habitation;
      Our days
   Laugh, lower, and lighten past, and find no station
      That stays. 
   But thought and faith are mightier things than time
      Can wrong,
   Made splendid once by speech, or made sublime
      By song. 
   Remembrance, though the tide of change that rolls
      Wax hoary,
   Gives earth and heaven, for song’s sake and the soul’s,
      Their glory.

Certainly, ‘for song’s sake’ we should love Mr. Swinburne’s work, cannot, indeed, help loving it, so marvellous a music-maker is he.  But what of the soul?  For the soul we must go elsewhere.

Poems and Ballads.  Third Series.  By Algernon Charles Swinburne. (Chatto and Windus.)

THREE NEW POETS

(Pall Mall Gazette, July 12, 1889.)

Books of poetry by young writers are usually promissory notes that are never met.  Now and then, however, one comes across a volume that is so far above the average that one can hardly resist the fascinating temptation of recklessly prophesying a fine future for its author.  Such a book Mr. Yeats’s Wanderings of Oisin certainly is.  Here we find nobility of treatment and nobility of subject-matter, delicacy of poetic instinct and richness of imaginative resource.  Unequal and uneven much of the work must be admitted to be.  Mr. Yeats does not try to ‘out-baby’ Wordsworth, we are glad to say; but he occasionally succeeds in ‘out-glittering’ Keats, and, here and there, in his book we come across strange crudities and irritating conceits.  But when he is at his best he is very good.  If he has not the grand simplicity of epic treatment, he has at least something of the largeness of vision that belongs to the epical temper.  He does not rob of their stature the great heroes of Celtic mythology.  He is very naive and very primitive and speaks of his giants with the air of a child.  Here is a characteristic passage from the account of Oisin’s return from the Island of Forgetfulness: