The comparison of the Gypsy language in this book with a dialect of the Hindostanee is interesting and useful, and the accounts of Gypsy habits and usages are novel and curious; and otherwise the work is a mass of rather entertaining rubbish.
Eros. A Series of connected Poems. By Lorenzo Somerville, London: Trübner & Co.
Patriotic Poems. By Francis de Haes Janvier. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott & Co.
The Contest: a Poem. By G. P. Carr. Chicago: P. L. Hanscom.
Poems. By Annie E. Clark. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott & Co.
All these little books are very prettily printed and very pleasingly bound. Each has its little index and its little dedication, and each its hundred pages of rhymes, and so each flutters forth into the world.
"Dove vai, povera foglia frale?"
To oblivion, by the briefest route, we think; and we find a pensive satisfaction in speculating upon the incidents of the journey. Shall any one challenge the wanderers in their flight, and seek to stay them? Shall they all reach an utter forgetfulness, and be resolved again into elemental milk and water, or shall one of them lodge in a dusty library, here and there, and, having ceased to be literature, lead the idle life of a curiosity? We imagine another as finding a moment's pause upon the centre-table of a country parlor. Perhaps a third, hastily bought at a railway station as the train started, and abandoned by the purchaser, may at this hour have entered upon a series of railway journeys in company with the brakeman's lamps and oil-bottles, with a fair prospect of surviving many generations of short-lived railway travellers. We figure to ourselves the heart-breaking desolation of a village-tavern, where, on the bureau under the mirror, to which the public comb and brush are chained, a fourth might linger for a while.
But in all the world shall anybody read one of these books? We fancy not even a critic; for the race so vigilantly malign in other days has lost its bitterness, or has been broken of its courage by the myriad numbers of the versifiers once so exultingly destroyed. Indeed, that cruel slaughter was but a combat with Nature,—
"So careful of the type she seems,
So careless of the single life";