“The Strayed Reveller and other Poems,” constitutes, we believe, the first published poetical work of its author, although the following would rather lead to the inference that he is no longer young.

  “But my youth reminds me:  ’Thou
  Hast lived light as these live now;
  As these are, thou too wert such.’”—­p. 59.

And, in another poem: 

    “In vain, all, all, in vain,
  They beat upon mine ear again,
  Those melancholy tones so sweet and still: 
  Those lute-like tones which, in long-distant years,
  Did steal into mine ears.”—­p. 86.

Accordingly, we find but little passion in the volume, only four pieces (for “The Strayed Reveller” can scarcely be so considered) being essentially connected with it.  Of these the “Modern Sappho” appears to us not only inferior, but as evidencing less maturity both of thought and style; the second, “Stagyrus,” is an urgent appeal to God; the third, “The New Sirens,” though passionate in utterance, is, in purpose, a rejection of passion, as having been weighed in the balance and found wanting; and, in the last, where he tells of the voice which once

  “Blew such a thrilling summons to his will,
      Yet could not shake it;
  Drained all the life his full heart had to spill;
      Yet could not break it:”—­

he records the “intolerable change of thought” with which it now comes to his “long-sobered heart.”  Perhaps “The Forsaken Merman” should be added to these; but the grief here is more nearly approaching to gloomy submission and the sickness of hope deferred.

The lessons that the author would learn of nature are, as set forth in the sonnet that opens the volume,

  “Of toil unsevered from tranquillity;
        Of labor that in one short hour outgrows
        Man’s noisy schemes,—­accomplished in repose,
  Too great for haste, too high for rivalry.”—­p. 1.

His conception of the poet is of one who

      “Sees before him life unroll,
  A placid and continuous whole;
  That general life which does not cease;
  Whose secret is, not joy, but peace;
  That life, whose dumb wish is not missed
  If birth proceeds, if things subsist;
  The life of plants and stones and rain;
  The life he craves:—­if not in vain
  Fate gave, what chance shall not control,
  His sad lucidity of soul.”—­pp. 123-4.

    (Resignation.)

Such is the author’s purpose in these poems.  He recognises in each thing a part of the whole:  and the poet must know even as he sees, or breathes, as by a spontaneous, half-passive exercise of a faculty:  he must receive rather than seek.

  “Action and suffering tho’ he know,
  He hath not lived, if he lives so.”

Connected with this view of life as “a placid and continuous whole,” is the principle which will be found here manifested in different modes, and thro’ different phases of event, of the permanence and changelessness of natural laws, and of the large necessity wherewith they compel life and man.  This is the thought which animates the “Fragment of an ‘Antigone:’” “The World and the Quietest” has no other scope than this:—­