Smiled well content, and to this childish task
Around the fire addressed its evening hours.
This is a particularly happy specimen of Mr. Stevenson's blank verse, in which metre, as a rule, he does not show to advantage. It is not that his verses are ever lame or faulty, for in the technical portion of the art he seldom fails, but that his rhymeless iambics remind the ear too much now of Tennyson, now of Keats. He is, on the contrary, exceedingly happy and very much himself in that metre of eight or seven syllables, with couplet-rhymes, which served so well the first poets who broke away from heroic verse, such as Swift and Lady Winchilsea, Green and Dyer. If he must be affiliated to any school of poets it is to these, who hold the first outworks between the old classical camp and the invading army of romance, to whom I should ally him. Martial is with those octo-syllabists of Queen Anne, and to Martial might well have been assigned, had they been in old Latin, the delicately homely lines, "To a Gardener." How felicitous is this quatrain about the onion—
Let first the onion flourish there,
Rose among roots, the maiden fair,
Wine-scented and poetic soul
Of the capacious salad-bowl.
Or this, in more irregular measure, and enfolding a loftier fancy—
Sing clearlier, Muse, or evermore be still,