The modern apostle of whom Miss
Naden sings is a young clergyman who preaches Pantheistic Socialism in
the Free Church of some provincial manufacturing town, converts
everybody, except the woman whom he loves, and is killed in a street
riot. The story is exceedingly powerful, but seems more suitable for
prose than for verse. It is right that a poet should be full of the
spirit of his age, but the external forms of modern life are hardly, as
yet, expressive of that spirit. They are truths of fact, not truths of
the imagination, and though they may give the poet an opportunity for
realism, they often rob the poem of the reality that is so essential to
it. Art, however, is a matter of result, not of theory, and if the fruit
is pleasant, we should not quarrel about the tree. Miss Naden's work is
distinguished by rich imagery, fine colour, and sweet music, and these
are things for which we should be grateful, wherever we find them. In
point of mere technical skill, her longer poems are the best; but some of
the shorter poems are very fascinating. This, for instance, is pretty:

The copyist group was gathered round
A time-worn fresco, world-renowned,
Whose central glory once had been
The face of Christ, the Nazarene.

And every copyist of the crowd
With his own soul that face endowed,
Gentle, severe, majestic, mean;
But which was Christ, the Nazarene?

Then one who watched them made complaint,
And marvelled, saying, 'Wherefore paint
Till ye be sure your eyes have seen
The face of Christ, the Nazarene?'

And this sonnet is full of suggestion:

The wine-flushed monarch slept, but in his ear
An angel breathed--'Repent, or choose the flame
Quenchless.' In dread he woke, but not in shame,
Deep musing--'Sin I love, yet hell I fear.'

Wherefore he left his feasts and minions dear,
And justly ruled, and died a saint in name.
But when his hasting spirit heavenward came,
A stern voice cried--'O Soul! what dost thou here?'

'Love I forswore, and wine, and kept my vow
To live a just and joyless life, and now
I crave reward.' The voice came like a knell--
'Fool! dost thou hope to find again thy mirth,
And those foul joys thou didst renounce on earth?
Yea, enter in! My heaven shall be thy hell.'

Miss Constance Naden deserves a high place among our living poetesses,
and this, as Mrs. Sharp has shown lately in her volume, entitled Women's
Voices, is no mean distinction.

Phyllis Browne's Life of Mrs. Somerville forms part of a very interesting
little series, called 'The World's Workers'--a collection of short
biographies catholic enough to include personalities so widely different
as Turner and Richard Cobden, Handel and Sir Titus Salt, Robert
Stephenson and Florence Nightingale, and yet possessing a certain
definite aim. As a mathematician and a scientist, the translator and
populariser of La Mecanique Celeste, and the author of an important book
on physical geography, Mrs. Somerville is, of course, well known. The
scientific bodies of Europe covered her with honours; her bust stands in
the hall of the Royal Society, and one of the Women's Colleges at Oxford
bears her name.