As the painters are always
pilfering from the poets, why should not the poet annex the domain of the
painter and use colour for the expression of his moods and music: blue
for sentiment, and red for passion, grey for cultured melancholy, and
green for descriptions? The book, then, is a kind of miniature rainbow,
and with all its varied sheets is as lovely as an advertisement hoarding.
As for the peripatetics--alas! they are not nightingales. Their note is
harsh and rugged, Mr. G. R. Sims is the god of their idolatry, their
style is the style of the Surrey Theatre, and we are sorry to see that
that disregard of the rights of property which always characterises the
able-bodied vagrant is extended by our tramps from the defensible
pilfering from hen-roosts to the indefensible pilfering from poets. When
we read such lines as:

And builded him a pyramid, four square,
Open to all the sky and every wind,

we feel that bad as poultry-snatching is, plagiarism is worse. Facilis
descensus Averno! From highway robbery and crimes of violence one sinks
gradually to literary petty larceny. However, there are coarsely
effective poems in the volume, such as A Super's Philosophy, Dick
Hewlett, a ballad of the Californian school, and Gentleman Bill; and
there is one rather pretty poem called The Return of Spring:

When robins hop on naked boughs,
And swell their throats with song,
When lab'rers trudge behind their ploughs,
And blithely whistle their teams along;

When glints of summer sunshine chase
Park shadows on the distant hills,
And scented tufts of pansies grace
Moist grots that 'scape rude Borean chills.

The last line is very disappointing. No poet, nowadays, should write of
'rude Boreas'; he might just as well call the dawn 'Aurora,' or say that
'Flora decks the enamelled meads.' But there are some nice touches in
the poem, and it is pleasant to find that tramps have their harmless
moments. On the whole, the volume, if it is not quite worth reading, is
at least worth looking at. The fool's motley in which it is arrayed is
extremely curious and extremely characteristic.

Mr. Irwin's muse comes to us more simply clad, and more gracefully. She
gains her colour-effect from the poet, not from the publisher. No
cockneyism or colloquialism mars the sweetness of her speech. She finds
music for every mood, and form for every feeling. In art as in life the
law of heredity holds good. On est toujours fits de quelqu'un. And so
it is easy to see that Mr. Irwin is a fervent admirer of Mr. Matthew
Arnold. But he is in no sense a plagiarist. He has succeeded in
studying a fine poet without stealing from him--a very difficult thing to
do--and though many of the reeds through which he blows have been touched
by other lips, yet he is able to draw new music from them. Like most of
our younger poets, Mr. Irwin is at his best in his sonnets, and those
entitled The Seeker after God and The Pillar of the Empire are really
remarkable. All through this volume, however, one comes across good
work, and the descriptions of Indian scenery are excellent. India, in
fact, is the picturesque background to these poems, and her monstrous
beasts, strange flowers and fantastic birds are used with much subtlety
for the production of artistic effect.