“Peaceful stand
The sentinel poplars in their gold-green plumes
Beside the Enzo bridge. Where late the hoofs
Of flying squadrons scared th’affrighted land
The soft cloud-shadows chase each other now
O’er violet gardens.”
As with many another poet, the ease with which Mrs. Chambers-Ketchum writes is at times a snare, leading her to accept too readily a hackneyed term or word, surrendering after too slight a struggle to the tyranny of rhyme. In her verse, also, there is sometimes a lack of smoothness that would set despair in the heart of the faithful scanner.
Was it because our ears were sick with a certain slang of “culture” that, when we stumbled over Krishna in the “Christian Legend,” we felt a strong desire to banish these Indian immortals to that Hades where languished the gods of Greece until Schiller called them forth to run riot in the field of religion as well as of art? And is not the term “legend” a strange misnomer, for the New Testament narrative of the raising of Lazarus? For Mrs. Chambers-Ketchum’s verse is essentially Christian and womanly, and even so short a notice of it would scarcely be complete without a mention of “Benny,” who, with his kitten and his “baby’s sense of right,” is already dear and familiar to the mothers and children of our whole country, whose kindly hearts will surely give to Benny’s mother their sympathy in his loss.
Surly Tim, and Other Stories. By Francis Hodgson Burnett. New York: Scribner, Armstrong & Co. 1877.