This is as admirable a bit of nonchalance as Wither’s,
Shall I, wasting in despair,
Die because a woman’s fair?
or Suckling’s,
Why so pale and wan, fond lover,
Prithee, why so pale?
with its salient advice to the languishing adorer.
Miss Brown’s small volume is by no means lacking in variety, either in theme or form; it is full of spontaneous music, rarely forcing the note in any lyric inspiration. In the sonnet she is less at ease: here one feels the effort, the mechanism; but only four sonnets are included in the volume, which shows her to be a true critic. There are certain poems that might, perhaps, with equal advantage have been eliminated, such as the over-musical numbers to Dian and Endymion; but in the main, Miss Brown has done her own blue-pencilling, and The Road to Castaly, as stated in the beginning, maintains a fine and even grade of workmanship.
In such poems as are touched to tenderness and reverence, half with the sweetness and half with the pain of life, Miss Brown makes her truest appeal. The fine ideality, the spiritual fealty of her nature, as shown in her work, always relates itself to one on the human side. It is not the fealty that shames a weaker nature by its rigid steadfastness, but that in which one sees his own wavering strife reflected. Her lines called “The Artisan,”[2]
written since the publication of her volume, are instinct with such feeling as comment would profane. One can but feel, with a quick pang of sympathy, that he, too, makes the appeal: