(3) Hithersea Mere. By Lady Augusta Noel, Author of Wandering Willie, From Generation to Generation, etc. (Macmillan and Co.)
(4) Margery Merton’s Girlhood. By Alice Corkran. (Blackie and Son.)
(5) Women and Work. By Emily Pfeiffer. (Trübner and Co.)
(6) Treasures of Art and Song. Edited by Robert Ellice Mack. (Griffith and Farren.)
(7) Rhymes and Roses. Illustrated by Ernest Wilson and St. Clair Simons. Cape Town Dicky. Illustrated by Alice Havers. The Deserted Pillage. Illustrated by Charles Gregory and John Hines. (Hildesheimer and Faulkner.)
THE POETS’ CORNER—IV
(Pall Mall Gazette, January 20, 1888.)
A cynical critic once remarked that no great poet is intelligible and no little poet worth understanding, but that otherwise poetry is an admirable thing. This, however, seems to us a somewhat harsh view of the subject. Little poets are an extremely interesting study. The best of them have often some new beauty to show us, and though the worst of them may bore yet they rarely brutalise. Poor Folks’ Lives, for instance, by the Rev. Frederick Langbridge, is a volume that could do no possible harm to any one. These poems display a healthy, rollicking, G. R. Sims tone of feeling, an almost unbounded regard for the converted drunkard, and a strong sympathy with the sufferings of the poor. As for their theology, it is of that honest, downright and popular kind, which in these rationalistic days is probably quite as useful as any other form of theological thought. Here is the opening of a poem called A Street Sermon, which is an interesting example of what muscular Christianity can do in the sphere of verse-making:
What, God fight shy of the city?
He’s t’ other side up I guess;
If you ever want to find Him,
Whitechapel’s the right address.
Those who prefer pseudo-poetical prose to really prosaic poetry will wish that Mr. Dalziel had converted most of his Pictures in the Fire into leaders for the Daily Telegraph, as, from the literary point of view, they have all the qualities dear to the Asiatic school. What a splendid leader the young lions of Fleet Street would have made out of The Prestige of England, for instance, a poem suggested by the opening of the Zulu war in 1879.