And
though he cannot pronounce 'tuberose' aright, at least he can sing of it
exquisitely.

Finally we come to Sturm und Drang, the work of an anonymous writer.
Opening the volume at hazard we come across these graceful lines:

How sweet to spend in this blue bay
The close of life's disastrous day,
To watch the morn break faintly free
Across the greyness of the sea,
What time Memnonian music fills
The shadows of the dewy hills.

Well, here is the touch of a poet, and we pluck up heart and read on. The
book is a curious but not inartistic combination of the mental attitude
of Mr. Matthew Arnold with the style of Lord Tennyson. Sometimes, as in
The Sicilian Hermit, we get merely the metre of Locksley Hall without its
music, merely its fine madness and not its fine magic. Still, elsewhere
there is good work, and Caliban in East London has a great deal of power
in it, though we do not like the adjective 'knockery' even in a poem on
Whitechapel.

On the whole, to those who watch the culture of the age, the most
interesting thing in young poets is not so much what they invent as what
masters they follow. A few years ago it was all Mr. Swinburne. That era
has happily passed away. The mimicry of passion is the most intolerable
of all poses. Now, it is all Lord Tennyson, and that is better. For a
young writer can gain more from the study of a literary poet than from
the study of a lyrist. He may become the pupil of the one, but he can
never be anything but the slave of the other. And so we are glad to see
in this volume direct and noble praise of him

* * * * *

Who plucked in English meadows flowers fair
As any that in unforgotten stave
Vied with the orient gold of Venus' hair
Or fringed the murmur of the AEgean wave,

which are the fine words in which this anonymous poet pays his tribute to
the Laureate.

(1) Echoes of Memory. By Atherton Furlong. (Field and Tuer.)

(2) Sagittulae. By E. W. Bowling. (Longmans, Green and Co.)

(3) Tuberose and Meadowsweet. By Mark Andre Raffalovich. (David Bogue.)

(4) Sturm und Drang. (Elliot Stock.)

In reply to the review A Bevy of Poets the following letter was published
in the Pall Mall Gazette on March 30, 1885, under the title of

THE ROOT OF THE MATTER

SIR,--I am sorry not to be able to accept the graceful etymology of your
reviewer who calls me to task for not knowing how to pronounce the title
of my book Tuberose and Meadowsweet. I insist, he fancifully says, 'on
making "tuberose" a trisyllable always, as if it were a potato blossom
and not a flower shaped like a tiny trumpet of ivory.' Alas! tuberose is
a trisyllable if properly derived from the Latin tuberosus, the lumpy
flower, having nothing to do with roses or with trumpets of ivory in name
any more than in nature. I am reminded by a great living poet that
another correctly wrote:

Or as the moonlight fills the open sky
Struggling with darkness--as a tuberose
Peoples some Indian dell with scents which lie

Like clouds above the flower from which they rose.

In justice to Shelley, whose lines I quote, your readers will admit that
I have good authority for making a trisyllable of tuberose.