Scientific laws are at once too abstract and too clearly
defined, and even the visible arts have not yet been able to translate
into any symbols of beauty the discoveries of modern science. At the
Arts and Crafts Exhibition we find the cosmogony of Moses, not the
cosmogony of Darwin. To Mr. Burne-Jones Man is still a fallen angel, not
a greater ape. Poverty and misery, upon the other hand, are terribly
concrete things. We find their incarnation everywhere and, as we are
discussing a matter of art, we have no hesitation in saying that they are
not devoid of picturesqueness. The etcher or the painter finds in them
'a subject made to his hand,' and the poet has admirable opportunities of
drawing weird and dramatic contrasts between the purple of the rich and
the rags of the poor. From Miss Nesbit's book comes not merely the voice
of sympathy but also the cry of revolution:

This is our vengeance day. Our masters made fat with our fasting
Shall fall before us like corn when the sickle for harvest is strong:
Old wrongs shall give might to our arm, remembrance of wrongs shall
make lasting
The graves we will dig for our tyrants we bore with too much and too
long.

The poem from which we take this stanza is remarkably vigorous, and the
only consolation that we can offer to the timid and the Tories is that as
long as so much strength is employed in blowing the trumpet, the sword,
so far as Miss Nesbit is concerned, will probably remain sheathed.
Personally, and looking at the matter from a purely artistic point of
view, we prefer Miss Nesbit's gentler moments. Her eye for Nature is
peculiarly keen. She has always an exquisite sense of colour and
sometimes a most delicate ear for music. Many of her poems, such as The
Moat House, Absolution, and The Singing of the Magnificat are true works
of art, and Vies Manquees is a little gem of song, with its dainty
dancing measure, its delicate and wilful fancy and the sharp poignant
note of passion that suddenly strikes across it, marring its light
laughter and lending its beauty a terrible and tragic meaning.

From the sonnets we take this at random:

Not Spring--too lavish of her bud and leaf--
But Autumn with sad eyes and brows austere,
When fields are bare, and woods are brown and sere,
And leaden skies weep their enchantless grief.
Spring is so much too bright, since Spring is brief,
And in our hearts is Autumn all the year,
Least sad when the wide pastures are most drear
And fields grieve most--robbed of the last gold sheaf.

These too, the opening stanzas of The Last Envoy, are charming:

The Wind, that through the silent woodland blows
O'er rippling corn and dreaming pastures goes
Straight to the garden where the heart of Spring
Faints in the heart of Summer's earliest rose.