Dimpling the meadow's grassy green and grey,
By furze that yellows all the common way,
Gathering the gladness of the common broom,
And too persistent fragrance of the may--

Gathering whatever is of sweet and dear,
The wandering wind has passed away from here,
Has passed to where within your garden waits
The concentrated sweetness of the year.

But Miss Nesbit is not to be judged by mere extracts. Her work is too
rich and too full for that.

Mr. Foster is an American poet who has read Hawthorne, which is wise of
him, and imitated Longfellow, which is not quite so commendable. His
Rebecca the Witch is a story of old Salem, written in the metre of
Hiawatha, with a few rhymes thrown in, and conceived in the spirit of the
author of The Scarlet Letter. The combination is not very satisfactory,
but the poem, as a piece of fiction, has many elements of interest. Mr.
Foster seems to be quite popular in America. The Chicago Times finds his
fancies 'very playful and sunny,' and the Indianapolis Journal speaks of
his 'tender and appreciative style.' He is certainly a clever
story-teller, and The Noah's Ark (which 'somehow had escaped the
sheriff's hand') is bright and amusing, and its pathos, like the pathos
of a melodrama, is a purely picturesque element not intended to be taken
too seriously. We cannot, however, recommend the definitely comic poems.
They are very depressing.

Mr. John Renton Denning dedicates his book to the Duke of Connaught, who
is Colonel-in-Chief of the Rifle Brigade, in which regiment Mr. Denning
was once himself a private soldier. His poems show an ardent love of
Keats and a profligate luxuriance of adjectives:

And I will build a bower for thee, sweet,
A verdurous shelter from the noonday heat,
Thick rustling ivy, broad and green, and shining,
With honeysuckle creeping up and twining
Its nectared sweetness round thee; violets
And daisies with their fringed coronets
And the white bells of tiny valley lilies,
And golden-leaved narcissi--daffodillies
Shall grow around thy dwelling--luscious fare
Of fruit on which the sun has laughed;

this is the immature manner of Endymion with a vengeance and is not to be
encouraged. Still, Mr. Denning is not always so anxious to reproduce the
faults of his master. Sometimes he writes with wonderful grace and
charm. Sylvia, for instance, is an exceedingly pretty poem, and The
Exile has many powerful and picturesque lines. Mr. Denning should make a
selection of his poems and publish them in better type and on better
paper. The 'get-up' of his volume, to use the slang phrase of our young
poets, is very bad indeed, and reflects no credit on the press of the
Education Society of Bombay.

The best poem in Mr. Joseph McKim's little book is, undoubtedly, William
the Silent. It is written in the spirited Macaulay style:

Awake, awake, ye burghers brave! shout, shout for joy and sing!
With thirty thousand at his back comes forth your hero King.
Now shake for ever from your necks the servile yoke of Spain,
And raise your arms and end for aye false Alva's cruel reign.
Ho! Maestricht, Liege, Brussels fair! pour forth your warriors brave,
And join your hands with him who comes your hearths and homes to save.

Some people like this style.

Mrs.