The Press.
London, England, 1855-05-19 00:00:00

476

verses from one of the most successful. The
sentiment, at all events, is unimpeachable :
Like a stern old friend, War grimly comes
To ths temple of peaceful life ;
With the well-known nod of his beckoning plumes,
He hurries us into the strife !
And we meet once more, in the fields of fate,
With our Chivalrous Enemy,
Who knows, by the grip of our hands in hate,
What the strength of our love may be.
0! the Lilies of France and Old England's Red Rose
Are twined in a coronal now ;
And at War's bloody bridal it glitters and glows
On Liberty's beautiful brow.
We have dashed together like waves and rocks!
We have fought till our shirts grew red!
We have met in the shuddering battle shocks,
Where none but the freed soul fled!

Now side by side, in the fields of fate,
And shoulder to shoulder are we;
And we know, by the grip of our hands in hate,
What the strength of our love may be.
0! the Lilies of France &o.
There is a peculiarity in this song which may
be observed, more or less, throughout the
whole of these pieces—the monosyllabic struc
ture of the verse. Of the lines we have quoted,
eight consist exclusively of words of one
syllable, and the remainder present only slight
deviations from this, probably unconscious,
standard. As we shall have occasion before
we close this series of papers to speak more at
large of Mr. Massey's poetry, we shall content
ourselves for the present with merely pointing
out a singularity which has the effect of ma-
terially impeding the impulse of the verse.
Mr. Massey is not always happy in his choice
of a refrain. In a song called " Down in
Australia," we have the following rhymes
running in the same form through every
verse :

Quaff a cup, and send a cheer up for the Old Land !
We have heard the Reapers shout
For the Harvest going out,
With the smoke of battle closing round the bold Land :
And our message shall be hurled
Up the ringing sides o' the world,—
There are true hearts beating for you in the Gold Land.
The measure is fantastical, and by no means
ineffective for festive purposes ; but its spirit
is clogged by the infelicitous repetition of
" old land " and " bold land," which reverbe-
rate upon the tympanum until it becomes in-
sensible to all other sounds. Mr. Massey
seems to have a passion for this kind of
double beat, indifferent to the means by which
it is obtained. Here is another refrain of a
similar form:—
Sing, 0 but a jubilant carouse
Awaits us in our far land,
When we shall thrust up conquering brows,
And take our Country's Garland.
To give due importance to the closing rhyme,
the last word must be accented girlind, a dis-
tortion of the accent which the ear instinc-
tively rejects. Mr. Massey's measures, which
seem to be generally adopted on account of
their eccentricity, we reserve for another
opportunity.

Echoes of the War (4), by Mr. Henry Sewell
Stokes, recal something of the spirit of the
old ballad, 'heavily laden with verbiage. We
have here the swing of the ancient verse, but
not the elasticity ; the pleasant tune, but not
the silver voice. Like most of the other poets,
Mr. Stokes takes up the topics of the cam-
paign one by one, and, consequently, we have
the Alma and Inkermann, the siege and Ba-
laklava, over again. The difficulty is to find
something new to say about these exhausted
themes ; and we are bound to say that this is
a difficulty Mr Stokes has not been able to
overcome. The only novelty in his poems is
to be tracod to their manner, which is light and
jaunty, with reminiscences perpetually floating
through it such as an opera-goer with a reten-
tive memory is plagued by when he is doomed
to listen to a piece of felonious music. The
opening of the " Battle of the Alma" will illus-
trate some of Mr. Stokes's specialities :

me No drum was heard, no shrill reveil,
But dark woods rustling in the gale,
That freshened as the stars grew pale,

cTSA,

cheerful warning ;
heather springing lithe
,sr to his scythe,
the lark sings blithe
harvest morning.

othergoents. By Henry Sewell

Gave them a cheer
ITT 1. F :-, 1,,.. itqfib from the heath 4
.-, v.; - . , And gay as mower to
Whek in the sky the
On ipme clear herr
, .
..,
(4) Echoes qA the War, and
en ,;, ,
~ Stokes. Loud": Longman,.
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