The Sun.
London, England, 1859-02-12 00:00:00

But the wheaten bread
As in shuddering dread
Put she always by with loathing sign.
And she gave the youth the cup : he drained it,
With impetuous haste he drained it dry;
Love was in his fevered heart and pained it.
Till it asked for joys she must deny."
and so on to the close of that rapturous celebration
of Pagan sensuality. Owen Meredith's ' Dream in
the Cafe,' however, is no more than an impassioned
allegory—as the closing stanza thus intimates :
Wreathe the rose, 0 Young Man; pour the wine, what
thou hast
That enjoy all the days of thy youth. Spare thou nought.
Yet beware 1.... at the board sits a ghost—'tis the Past ;
In thy heart lurks a weird Necromancer—'tis Thought.
"The Wanderer" we cannot but think is most "at
home" in his vivid limning of luxurious " interiors.''
What the cottage house-room is to the brush of
Webster—the Parisian " entresol," the mayfair
" boudoir," the reception-hall of the Italian palazzo
are to the pen of Owen Meredith. Every " meuble,"
every nick-nack is specified with a wondrous parti-
cularity—sometimes with a luminous touch enough
—when he speaks of
Catching a gleam on the picture up there
Of the saint in the wilderness under the oak ;
And a light on the brow of the bronze Voltaire,
Like the ghost of a cynical joke.
Here is a pretty, reproachful appeal To Mignonne--.
At morning, from the sunlight
I shall miss your sunny face
Leaning, laughing, on my shoulder
With its careless infant grace ;
And your hand there,
With its rosy, inside colour,
And the sparkle of its rings;
And your soul from this old chamber
Miss'd in fifty little things,
When I stand there.
Listen now to the quaint tones of the fantastic
little song of Metempsychosis—
She fann'd my life out with her soft little sighs :
She hush'd me to death with her face so fair:
I was drunk with the light of her wild blue eyes,
And strangled dumb in her long gold hair.
So now I'm a blessed and wandering ghost,
Tho' I cannot quite find out my way up to heaven :

But I hover about o'er the long reedy coast,
In the wistful light of a low red even.
I have borrow'd the coat of a little grey gnat :
There's a small sharp song I have leaned how to sing:
I know a green place she is sure to be at :
I shall light on her neck there, and sting, and sting.
Tra-la-la, tra-la-la, life never pleased me
I fly where I list now, and sleep at my ease.
Buzz, buzz, buzz I the dead only are free.

Yonder's my way now. Give place if you please.
It is the " Second Life" echoed by Aytoun from
Rhineland— "
" Alter life's departing sigh
To the spots I loved most dearly,
In the sunshine and the shadow,
By the fountain welling clearly,
Through the wood and o'er the meadow
Flit I like a butterfly.
" There a gentle fair I spy
Round the maiden's tresses fly,
From her chaplet I discover
All that I had lost in dying,
Still with her and with her lover.
Who so happy then as I ?”
We cannot loiter longer however over pages that are
full for us of fascination. To " The Wanderer"
itself we commend the lovers of poetry, confident
of winning their thanks for that recommendation.
In the young author of the volume they will find
no mere rhyming poetaster—but a poet true, sen-
suous, earnest, eloquent, impassioned.