He is
at his best, however, in his sonnets. Their architecture is not always
of the finest order but, here and there, one meets with lines that are
graceful and felicitous.

Like silver swallows on a summer morn
Cutting the air with momentary wings,

is pretty, and on flowers Mr. Brodie writes quite charmingly. The only
thoroughly bad piece in the book is The Workman's Song. Nothing can be
said in favour of

Is there a bit of blue, boys?
Is there a bit of blue?
In heaven's leaden hue, boys?
'Tis hope's eye peeping through . . .

for optimism of this kind is far more dispiriting than Schopenhauer or
Hartmann at their worst, nor are there really any grounds for supposing
that the British workman enjoys third-rate poetry.

(1) The Discovery and Other Poems. By Glenessa. (National Publishing
Co.)

(2) Vortigern and Rowena: A Dramatic Cantata. By Edwin Ellis Griffin.
(Hutchings and Crowsley.)

(3) The Poems of Madame de la Mothe Guyon. Edited and arranged by the
Rev. A. Saunders Dyer, M.A. (Bryce and Son.)

(4) Stanzas and Sonnets. By J. Pierce, M.A. (Longmans, Green and Co.)

(5) In Hours of Leisure. By Clifford Harrison. (Kegan Paul.)

(6) AEonial. By the Author of The White Africans. (Elliot Stock.)

(7) Seymour's Inheritance. By James Ross. (Arrowsmith.)

(8) Lyrics of the Sea. By E. H. Brodie. (Bell and Sons.)

MR. PATER'S IMAGINARY PORTRAITS

(Pall Mall Gazette, June 11, 1887.)

To convey ideas through the medium of images has always been the aim of
those who are artists as well as thinkers in literature, and it is to a
desire to give a sensuous environment to intellectual concepts that we
owe Mr. Pater's last volume. For these Imaginary or, as we should prefer
to call them, Imaginative Portraits of his, form a series of philosophic
studies in which the philosophy is tempered by personality, and the
thought shown under varying conditions of mood and manner, the very
permanence of each principle gaining something through the change and
colour of the life through which it finds expression. The most
fascinating of all these pictures is undoubtedly that of Sebastian Van
Storck. The account of Watteau is perhaps a little too fanciful, and the
description of him as one who was 'always a seeker after something in the
world, that is there in no satisfying measure, or not at all,' seems to
us more applicable to him who saw Mona Lisa sitting among the rocks than
to the gay and debonair peintre des fetes galantes. But Sebastian, the
grave young Dutch philosopher, is charmingly drawn. From the first
glimpse we get of him, skating over the water-meadows with his plume of
squirrel's tail and his fur muff, in all the modest pleasantness of
boyhood, down to his strange death in the desolate house amid the sands
of the Helder, we seem to see him, to know him, almost to hear the low
music of his voice. He is a dreamer, as the common phrase goes, and yet
he is poetical in this sense, that his theorems shape life for him,
directly.