Fearless, unveiled, and unattended
Strolled maidens to and fro:
Youths looked respect, but never bended
Obsequiously low.And each with other, sans condition,
Held parley brief or long,
Without provoking coarse suspicion
Of marriage, or of wrong.All were well clad, and none were better,
And gems beheld I none,
Save where there hung a jewelled fetter,
Symbolic, in the sun.I saw a noble-looking maiden
Close Dante’s solemn book,
And go, with crate of linen laden
And wash it in the brook.Anon, a broad-browed poet, dragging
A load of logs along,
To warm his hearth, withal not flagging
In current of his song.Each one some handicraft attempted
Or helped to till the soil:
None but the aged were exempted
From communistic toil.
Such an expression as ‘coarse suspicion of marriage’ is not very fortunate; the log-rolling poet of the fifth stanza is an ideal that we have already realised and one in which we had but little comfort, and the fourth stanza leaves us in doubt whether Mr. Austin means that washerwomen are to take to reading Dante, or that students of Italian literature are to wash their own clothes. But, on the whole, though Mr. Austin’s vision of the citta divina of the future is not very inspiriting, it is certainly extremely interesting as a sign of the times, and it is evident from the two concluding lines of the following stanzas that there will be no danger of the intellect being overworked:
Age lorded not, nor rose the hectic
Up to the cheek of youth;
But reigned throughout their dialectic
Sobriety of truth.And if a long-held contest tended
To ill-defined result,
It was by calm consent suspended
As over-difficult.
Mr. Austin, however, has other moods, and, perhaps, he is at his best when he is writing about flowers. Occasionally he wearies the reader by tedious enumerations of plants, lacking indeed reticence and tact and selection in many of his descriptions, but, as a rule, he is very pleasant when he is babbling of green fields. How pretty these stanzas from the dedication are!
When vines, just newly burgeoned, link
Their hands to join the dance of Spring,
Green lizards glisten from cleft and chink,
And almond blossoms rosy pink
Cluster and perch, ere taking wing;Where over strips of emerald wheat
Glimmer red peach and snowy pear,
And nightingales all day long repeat
Their love-song, not less glad than sweet
They chant in sorrow and gloom elsewhere;Where purple iris-banners scale
Defending walls and crumbling ledge,
And virgin windflowers, lithe and frail,
Now mantling red, now trembling pale,
Peep out from furrow and hide in hedge.
Some of the sonnets also (notably, one entitled When Acorns Fall) are very charming, and though, as a whole, Love’s Widowhood is tedious and prolix, still it contains some very felicitous touches. We wish, however, that Mr. Austin would not write such lines as
Pippins of every sort, and codlins manifold.
‘Codlins manifold’ is a monstrous expression.
Mr. W. J. Linton’s fame as a wood-engraver has somewhat obscured the merits of his poetry. His Claribel and Other Poems, published in 1865, is now a scarce book, and far more scarce is the collection of lyrics which he printed in 1887 at his own press and brought out under the title of Love-Lore. The large and handsome volume that now lies before us contains nearly all these later poems as well as a selection from Claribel and many renderings, in the original metre, of French poems ranging from the thirteenth century to our own day. A portrait of Mr. Linton is prefixed, and the book is dedicated ‘To William Bell Scott, my friend for nearly fifty years.’ As a poet Mr. Linton is always fanciful with a studied fancifulness, and often felicitous with a chance felicity. He is fascinated by our seventeenth-century singers, and has, here and there, succeeded in catching something of their quaintness and not a little of their charm. There is a pleasant flavour about his verse. It is entirely free from violence and from vagueness, those two besetting sins of so much modern poetry. It is clear in outline and restrained in form, and, at its best, has much that is light and lovely about it. How graceful, for instance, this is!
BARE FEET
O fair white feet! O dawn-white feet
Of Her my hope may claim!
Bare-footed through the dew she came
Her Love to meet.Star-glancing feet, the windflowers sweet
Might envy, without shame,
As through the grass they lightly came,
Her Love to meet.O Maiden sweet, with flower-kiss’d feet!
My heart your footstool name!
Bare-footed through the dew she came,
Her Love to meet.