Such a verse, for instance, as:

I hear the little children say
(For the tale will never die)
How the old pump flowed both night and day
When the brooks and the wells ran dry,

has all the ring of Macaulay in it, and is a form of poetry which cannot
possibly harm anybody, even if translated into French. Any inaccurate
ideas of the laws of nature which the children might get from the passage
in question could easily be corrected afterwards by a lecture on
Hydrostatics. The poem, however, which gives us most pleasure is the one
called The Dear Old Knocker on the Door. It is appropriately illustrated
by Mr. Tristram Ellis. We quote the concluding verses of the first and
last stanzas:

Blithe voices then so dear
Send up their shouts once more,
Then sounds again on mem'ry's ear
The dear old knocker on the door.
. . . . .
When mem'ry turns the key
Where time has placed my score,
Encased 'mid treasured thoughts must be
The dear old knocker on the door.

The cynic may mock at the subject of these verses, but we do not. Why
not an ode on a knocker? Does not Victor Hugo's tragedy of Lucrece
Borgia turn on the defacement of a doorplate? Mr. Furlong must not be
discouraged. Perhaps he will write poetry some day. If he does we would
earnestly appeal to him to give up calling a cock 'proud chanticleer.'
Few synonyms are so depressing.

Having been lured by the Circe of a white vellum binding into the region
of the pump and doormat, we turn to a modest little volume by Mr. Bowling
of St. John's College, Cambridge, entitled Sagittulae. And they are
indeed delicate little arrows, for they are winged with the lightness of
the lyric and barbed daintily with satire. AEsthesis and Athletes is a
sweet idyll, and nothing can be more pathetic than the Tragedy of the
XIX. Century, which tells of a luckless examiner condemned in his public
capacity to pluck for her Little-go the girl graduate whom he privately
adores. Girton seems to be having an important influence on the
Cambridge school of poetry. We are not surprised. The Graces are the
Graces always, even when they wear spectacles.

Then comes Tuberose and Meadowsweet, by Mr. Mark Andre Raffalovich. This
is really a remarkable little volume, and contains many strange and
beautiful poems. To say of these poems that they are unhealthy and bring
with them the heavy odours of the hothouse is to point out neither their
defect nor their merit, but their quality merely. And though Mr.
Raffalovich is not a wonderful poet, still he is a subtle artist in
poetry. Indeed, in his way he is a boyish master of curious music and of
fantastic rhyme, and can strike on the lute of language so many lovely
chords that it seems a pity he does not know how to pronounce the title
of his book and the theme of his songs. For he insists on making
'tuberose' a trisyllable always, as if it were a potato blossom and not a
flower shaped like a tiny trumpet of ivory. However, for the sake of his
meadowsweet and his spring-green binding this must be forgiven him.