The times., 1899-01-08

be vague, or fermless. or soar above the
heads of ordinary folk, but there is nothing
little or paltry about one single line of 1t.
The man who wrote this book may never
be a great poet, but he is a thinker of noble
thoughts. His failing is in expression.
never in idea. Yet here and there his eX
preston is singularly fitting and beautiful
Take, for instance, his Song Of the
Wave and one finds sea pictures as vivid
and as perfect as color photography. The
poem is a series OF glmpses of the differ
ent moods of the ocean. There are many
verses, but here are some of them:
This is the song of the wave! The dawn leaped
out of the Sea,
And the waters lay smooth as a silver shield,
And the sin-rays srnote on the waters like
golden sword.
Then Il wind blew ont Of the morning
And the waters ustlcd
And the wave was born!
This is the song Of the wave! The wind blew out
of The sunset,
And the west was urid as Hell.
The black clouds rose like tomb, for the sun
was dead.
Then the wind smote full as the breath of God,
And The wave called to its brothers,
This is the crest Of life
This is the song of the wave, that rises to fall,
Il
That has caught the soul OF the moonlight,
Caught and prisoncd the moonbeams;
Its edge Is iritterCd to foam.
This is the wave.
| Now. the man who could write that has
| the soul of poet. But somehow or other,
in reading the book, one gets the impress
sion that he cares but little about reach
ing the souls of other men. He addresses
the esoteric few who can understand. He
has great thoughts, and the power of word
painting. and could he but put into his
verse that intangible lyric quality of which
Lowell spoke in THE Secret" the one
| magic that saves from disaster he might
be a great poet. Whether he can do this
| remains TO be seen. Meanwhile The Song
of the Wave" and its companions are high
and noble fragments of thought. New
York: Charles Scribner's Sons. Washing
ton: Ballantyne. S1.50)
| new book by Robert Burns Wilson is
The Shadows OF the Trees, and Other
| Poems and it is illustrated by some un-
commonly striking tree pictures. There
! is nothing very remarkable in the book it
self; in fact. it is difficult to remember,
1 after reading it, what any of the verses
were about. Mr.. Wilson's pet falkland
he hugs it very closely-is space-w writing
| He spins out a wee small idea till II occu-
! pies four times the space that it ought
to. and he knows not concentration. For
instance, there is dainty little lyric in
! the volume. which he calls "A Phantasy'
NOT particularly good name, by the way
The first two verses may be worth quoting,
for in themselves they voice pleasant and
not too hackneyed thought:
| The apple buds in crystal seet,
The peach tree blooms with snow;
! The gray hills and the gray clouds meet,
Tie meadow brook runs low.
In frost and sad ialf-sence bound
And ye; il sings not i'll;
Happy spirit in the ground
RcincmbeTcth summer still.
Now. that is a pretty fancy, and It is
skillfuly rounded out in the next three
stanzas; but one finds with displeasure on
turning the leaf that the idea is spread out
through no less than fourteen successive
verses after the five which adequately eX-
press the idea. One is constrained to re-
mind the author. as others have been re-
minded, that George Washington had one
great virtue; he never stopped over. 1t
is just as important not to slop over in
verse as in prose. (New York: r. H. Rus
sell. $1.5oJ
A thin brown volume called AT Eratos
Fame" by John Myers O'Hara, comes hith-
er from Chicago. The title is rather
bad one, because 10 the average reader
it does not mean anything, and the aver
age reader ought to be considered, even in
writing books of poetry. But inside the
modest covers there is a good deal of
thought, somewhat crudely expressed in
verses sometimes commonplace, and often
/ limping in metre and phrase. The book is
alive; the writer has put something of
himself into IT, and 1t interests for that
reason. When 'lssome' Is rhymed with
kiss them and we have such another
rhyme as "burnless" and ''urnless," it is
impossible to refrain from smiles
Mr.. O'Hara does not trouble himself
about such small things as mispronuncia-
| tion and barbarously coined words, nor
does he hesitate TO attack high subjects
with but an imperfect equipment of words
and phrases. All the same. there are no.
tions in the book. and here and there may
be found expressions OF singularly happy
wording. Here, for instance, is n quatrain
| torn out of the heart of sonnet on
Pain which is not bad at all:
Love for past pain, the hate Of present grief
How strange the contrast hard to reconcile;
Do ghosts of sorrows CLEAN a grace TO sm'ic
And change with lime 10 glories that survive:
And there is poem about princess who
was loved by her fathers jester, and her
scorn, her revenge and her codness form
| the basis for a most dramatic story,
though but imperfectly told in verse. In
| fine. if Mr.. OHara will make up his mind
| that he has a tremendous lot to learn
about the making OF poetry before he can
really be poet-that mere rhyme and
metre do not constitute verse-he may
some day strike out a lyric which will be
part OF American literature. Chicago
Meyer & MilIerl