And still the Athenian Altar's glimmering Doubt
On all religions—evermore the same.
What tears shall wash its sad inscription out?
What hand shall write thereon His other name?
The last five lines of Mrs. Piatt's poem express finely the feeling as to God and religion which now fills countless numbers of the truest hearts and brightest minds.
—"As You Like It" has just been published in the "Clarendon Press Series of Shakespeare's Select Plays." Mr. Grant White, in his article "On Reading Shakespeare," in the present number of "The Galaxy," has said so much in regard to this series and its present editor,[29] William Aldis Wright, that it is only necessary for us to record here the appearance of this edition of Shakespeare's most charming comedy, and to say that Shakespeare's lovers and students will find in it some new views which are interesting, and appear to be sound, and a copious and careful body of annotation.
—Of poetry, or rather of verse, as we before remarked, our table is full this month, and with it we have a dictionary to teach us to rhyme withal.[30] "Walker's Rhyming Dictionary" has had complete possession of this field for three quarters of a century, and we are not sure that it will be supplanted by Mr. Barnum's. His new plan is very systematic. He classifies his words in groups—single rhymes, double rhymes, triple, quadruple, and even quintuple rhymes; and then he divides and subdivides and parcels off his words under separate headings. He does not give definitions. The book will be valuable to the student of the English language, more so, we are inclined to think, than to the mere rhyme-hunter, who will prefer to run his finger and his eye down a column of words arranged merely according to their final letters.
—Mr. Tennyson's new dramatic poem is before us in the elegant Boston typography of Ticknor & Field's worthy successors.[31] The poet laureate added little to his fame by his previous dramatic work, "Queen Mary"; he will gain less by this. It is good of course to a certain degree, but it is only "fair to middling" Tennysonian work. We find in it not a passage that stirs us, not one that charms. It puts the story of the Norman Conquest of England into a dramatic form and into good blank verse, with sound and sensible treatment of the subject, and that is all. Its author's good taste, and above all his experience, his dexterity, acquired by such long practice, are manifest on every page; but there is little more. He dedicates it to the present Lord Lytton, in evident desire to wipe out the memory of the old feud between him and Bulwer Lytton; but that was too black and too bitter to be sponged away with a little sugar and water.
—Mr. Latham Cornell Strong is modest in his preface about his collection of verse,[32] although he is rather too elaborately metaphorical in his way of blushing properly. He says, as to the flaws in his poems, that he "has a reasonable confidence that they will not all be discovered by any one reader." This may be true from the probable fact that no one reader will read them all; we think that we have met with enough of them to show that Mr. Strong might well have refrained himself from publication. For example, we think that a true poet could hardly have written many such passages as these, and there are many such in the volume:
The night is rising from the trees,
Her hands, uplifted, trail with stars
The moon hath flung its banners on the sward
Old Rupert named, alone of all the rest
She most esteemed, for he had brought her flowers,
To wreathe her tresses and make manifest
His sympathy for her, in many ways expressed
The last four lines unite incorrectness, tameness, and inelegance with remarkable and fatal facility.