has some merit and might be converted into a good sonnet. The majority of the poems, however, are quite worthless. There seems to be some curious connection between piety and poor rhymes.
Lord Henry Somerset’s verse is not so good as his music. Most of the Songs of Adieu are marred by their excessive sentimentality of feeling and by the commonplace character of their weak and lax form. There is nothing that is new and little that is true in verse of this kind:
The golden leaves are falling,
Falling one by one,
Their tender ‘Adieux’ calling
To the cold autumnal sun.
The trees in the keen and frosty air
Stand out against the sky,
’Twould seem they stretch their branches bare
To Heaven in agony.
It can be produced in any quantity. Lord Henry Somerset has too much heart and too little art to make a good poet, and such art as he does possess is devoid of almost every intellectual quality and entirely lacking in any intellectual strength. He has nothing to say and says it.
Mrs. Cora M. Davis is eloquent about the splendours of what the authoress of The Circle of Seasons calls ‘this earthly ball.’
Let’s sing the beauties of this grand old earth,
she cries, and proceeds to tell how
Imagination paints old Egypt’s former glory,
Of mighty temples reaching heavenward,
Of grim, colossal statues, whose barbaric story
The caustic pens of erudition still record,
Whose ancient cities of glittering minarets
Reflect the gold of Afric’s gorgeous sunsets.
‘The caustic pens of erudition’ is quite delightful and will be appreciated by all Egyptologists. There is also a charming passage in the same poem on the pictures of the Old Masters:
the mellow richness of whose tints impart,
By contrast, greater delicacy still to modern art.