In Leisure Time, by W. S. Mavor (Elliot Stock) is, so my Baronite reports, a daintily-bound little volume of blameless verse, unambitious, as may be inferred from its title. The author writes like a classical scholar, his lines are fluent and melodious, his metre and rhyme unimpeachable, while some of the poems, such as "Zaleucus" and "A Vision," rise distinctly above the general level. In others there are passages which my Baronite—a sadly prosaic and matter-of-fact person—owns to having found slightly obscure.
For example, in the following couplet:—
"In vain the fickle demon sports
With fetid remnants of decay."
He quite failed to discover what particular—or rather anything but particular—demon is referred to, or why he should amuse himself in so eccentric and unpleasant a manner.
Nor, my Baronite says, was his conception of contentment greatly assisted by this somewhat complicated comparison:—
"Contentment is a love-commissioned barque
Sailing a self-less sea—a sea whose flood
Is ordered alway by the laughing guns
Of Virtue's fortalice, whose armament,
Primed with rose-petal powder, doth discharge
In generous rounds of sympathy with all,
Scattering happiness, whose smile betrays
The pangless hurt."
But that, he is quite willing to admit, may be rather the fault of his own imagination than the poet's. Again, in a poem entitled "Love's Messengers," the author writes:—
"Flit thou along on softly feathered feet,
Noiseless, thou shadowy-pinioned minister,
And gently fan, with midnight gale, my sweet,
Lest thou awaken her."
Which, to my Baronite, suggests the difficulty that, if the minister fans the lady with his shadowy pinions "gently," he will fail to produce anything resembling a "midnight gale"; on the other hand, if he performs the part of invisible punkah so energetically as to suggest a gale, he can hardly help awakening her unless she is a very heavy sleeper indeed—and might give her a cold in the head. Surely this is rather an unfair dilemma on which to place a feathered minister of any denomination.