Should it be eventually found that the Tanganyika is connected with the Albert Nyanza, and the latter by its westerly or any other effluent with the Bahr el Ghazal, it will necessarily follow that the Tanganyika, or rather the river Marunga, which enters that lake at its southern extremity, will form the true head water of the Nile, and the course of the mighty river will then be proved to extend through forty degrees of latitude, and the great lakes Tanganyika and Albert Nyanza will be but the expansion of a majestic river the course of which, from its fountain head to its embouchure, will exceed four thousand miles.

and the Nile. The Danube and the Rhine | ry honour paid to the great source of Egypt's have their sources very near to each other, fertility. The river, which flows from Gonbut the streams diverge, the one, like the dokoro at its junction with the Bahr el Zambesi, to the east, the other, like the Ghazal, is only eighty or a hundred yards Nile, to the North, both traversing a vast across, while the Bahr el Ghazal is half a extent of country before they pour their mile in width, and after the junction of the waters into the sea. This most interesting two streams Captain Grant admits that problem is now, perhaps, nearer its solution there is an evident increase in breadth and than it has ever been, for Dr. Livingstone's in- width, that the water thenceforward bestructions for his new journey of exploration comes purer, losing much of its turbid apare to reach the Tanganyika, and to direct pearance, and that the current is considerahis particular attention to its effluent; and bly increased.* The river which flows past as the distance between the two lakes Tan- Gondokoro, and which Captain Speke, in ganyika and Albert Nyanza cannot be con- his map, traces from the Victoria Nyanza, siderable, it is to be hoped that he will be is, Dr. Beke informs us, known there not as able to test the correctness of the informa- the Bahr el Abyad, or White Nile, but as tion which he formerly received, as well as the Bahr el Djebel, or mountain river. that given to Captains Burton and Speke. The question afterwards to be determined will be, whether the Albert Nyanza is connected with the Nile, and if so, how connected. The river which flows from the Victoria Nyanza was traced by Captain Speke for only fifty miles, but Mr. Baker has established by personal observation the fact that it flows into the Albert Nyanza, having ascended its banks to the point where Captain Speke left it, namely, the Karuma Falls. Mr. Baker asserts that he saw, or imagined he saw, a river at a distance of twenty miles from the furthest northerly point which he reached on the Albert Nyanza, issuing from the lake and traversing We have, in a former number of the the plain beyond; but nothing can be rea- Quarterly Review,' expressed our doubts sonably affirmed or inferred from such dis- whether the result of Captain Speke's tant observation. The Albert Nyanza may travels could be accepted by geographers be connected with the Nile by some great as final solution of the great problem which but hitherto undiscovered stream communi- has perplexed the scientific and the curious cating with the Bahr el Ghazal (the Nile of of all ages, and the important discovery by Herodotus), and this supposition is rendered Mr. Baker of the great Albert Nyanza conhighly probable when taken in connexion firms us in that opinion; for the notion of with the information which Mr. Baker re- Captain Speke that the little Luta Nzige ceived from the people residing on the shores (Albert Victoria) was only a backwater of of the Albert Nyanza, that the lake extends to the Nile,' which the river must fill' bethe north-west for about forty miles, when it fore it could continue its course, has been suddenly turns to the west, contracting proved to be completely erroneous. gradually, and that its extent is unknown. Albert Nyanza is a lake of vast although That the Bahr el Ghazal may ultimately unknown dimensions, but certainly inferior prove to be the true Nile is thus rendered extremely probable, nor does its mere-like character, so far as it has been explored, militate against such a supposition. The characteristic of the Nile below Khartúm, for a considerable part of its course, and for a large portion of the year, is that of a very sluggish stream with gigantic reeds springing out of the stagnant water on each side. In descending the stream from Gondokoro, on passing the Bahr el Ghazal, it is a custom, Captain Grant tells us, for all boats to fire a gun as a salute, possibly a traditiona-ners and character.

The

neither to the Victoria Nyanza nor the Tanganyika, receiving the drainage of extensive mountains ranges on the west, and of the Utumbi, Uganda, and Unyoro countries to the east. There is even considerable reason to doubt whether the river struck by Captain Speke at Madi is even the same which he left at the Karuma Falls, for no part of its subsequent course, although

*See p. 380 of Captain Grant's Walk across Africa,'- -a remarkable record of courageous endurance and a most amusing picture of African man

indicated upon a map for two hundred geographical miles, was ever seen by him: and Dr. Peney, one of the Austrian missionaries, who resided for nine years at Gondokoro, concluded from the results of long observation that the river which flows past that place contributes little or nothing to the flood of the Nile. The sum of Captain Speke's discoveries, therefore, now appears to consist in the fact that he discovered in his first exploratory journey the great lake Victoria Nyanza, and in his second a river issuing from it, which, after a not very lengthened course, has been ascertained to fall, in common, however, with several other rivers probably as large if not larger than itself, into another enormous lake, now denominated the Albert Nyanza; but of the effluent of this lake positively nothing is at present known, however great may be the probability that a connexion between the Nile of Egypt and the lake may be hereafter incontrovertibly proved.

From the Saturday Review. NEW POETRY.*

WHY should any one, with certain obvious exceptions, go on writing poetry? amusement to the writers, and, on the The answer is plain; that it is a great undeniable evils, it is not a very great anwhole, after making allowance for certain noyance to any one else. We exclude, of course, the possible danger of being called upon to listen to an author's recital of his their merits. But there is the great advanworks, or to give him a candid opinion of tage about a poem that it is generally short. Few men in these days have the courage for writing original epics, though they have a fancy for translating them. Mr. Brodie, indeed, is going to bring out a poem in four cantos. Only one has appeared at present, and persons who like such reading as we are about to describe may get through it very comfortably in half an hour. Taken in these moderate doses, we incline to the shall not be suspected of wishing to detract opinion that some people may not impossifrom the real merits of the gallant exbly finish it. We do not, however, recomplorer, whose untimely death is so generally mend the experiment. Mr. Brodie favours and justly deplored. Whatever may be us with a preface, giving an anticipatory the ultimate value assigned to the facts defence for having written a poem at all. ascertained by him, there can be no differ-He says that people will tell him, first, that ence of opinion either as to the intrepidity this is not a poetical age; and, secondly, of his character or on the magnitude of that he should have chosen a subject more the exploit of the march across the continent of Africa, which he and his companion Captain Grant accomplished in the face of so many dangers and at the cost of many sufferings and privations.

We trust that in the above remarks we

removed from him in time. Instead of describing the cruise of the Erebus and Terror, he should have taken the "Discovery of America," the "Death of Montezuma," the "Fall of Wallenstein," or some similarThe complete solution of the great geo-about to raise either of these objections. ly lively subject. We certainly are not graphical problem may not be given to one explorer, nor perhaps will it be accomplished in one generation, but we certainly appear to be approaching nearer and nearer to its determination. If the lake Tanganyika should prove to be connected with the Albert Nyanza, and the Albert Nyanza by its westerly or other effluent with the great river of Egypt, to Dr. Livingstone may yet be awarded the honour of being the real discoverer of the source of the Nile, the probable region of which he pointed out long before any of the expeditions from the eastern coast of Africa had been undertaken; and he may soon, by a careful survey of the Tanganyika and possibly also of the Albert Nyanza, be on the verge of a discovery which will far surpass in interest any that has hitherto been made within the basin of the Nile.

Our one recommendation to Mr. Brodie
and the divisions into lines and stanzas.
would be next time to leave out the rhymes
His poem
will run into very tolerable
prose; but it comes under no definition of
poetry that we know of, except that of be-
and it is really curious that a man should
ing in verse. It is mere prose bewitched;
fancy himsek to be writing a poem when he
is merely torturing Captain Sherard Os-
born's book into Spenserian stanzas. The
process certainly is free from one objection.
There is no affectation of the ordinary kind
about his writing. It never becomes turgid
or metaphorical or bombastic (except, in-
deed, that an invocation of the Spirit of

* Euthanasia. By Erasmus H. Brodie. Lon

don: Longmans & Co. 1866.

The Wife's Litany, and other Pieces. By John Butler Chorley. London: Chapman & Hall. 1865.

1

Poesy is inserted à propos of nothing partic-| A good many volunteers join Sir John, and ular about half-way through); but then it hereupon the Spirit of Poesy is invoked as is at least as necessary for a poet to try to before mentioned, with some of the custombe vigorous as to avoid being overstrained, ary talk about "Tiber's side and Arno's whereas Mr. Brodie jogs as contentedly rill;" after which the progress of the expealong in his Spenserian stanzas as if he was dition is duly detailed in the style of "Our writing an account of the expedition for the Own Correspondent." The ships, we are newspapers. The whole performance is told, were well found :about on the level of those curious productions which are sometimes sent in for prize poems; in which the author has been so surprised at finding that he can rhyme, that he has quite forgotten to do anything else. It is a really curious psychological phenomenon that any educated man should have written such stuff as Euthanasia, and been deceived by its external form into fancying If there too spiteful winter closed the gate, that it had more in common with Spenser than with a column of the Times.

The so-called poem begins with a statement of the subject, with remarks on the general impulse communicated to science by the peace of 1815, and the special impulse towards Arctic discovery, followed by some observations about the Esquimaux, and "their manners strange, how every gift they lick, needle or.saw or looking-glass or knife." Luckily, he passes them over shortly, though "inclined, did time admit, their clean Pure dome of snow to sing and winter's household scene." We are then favoured with a slight sketch of Arctic discovery between the years 1815 and 1845, in such terms as these "fresh expeditions constantly were made year after year, and winters whole men stayed in forest deserts." After which Sir John Barrow makes a

long speech, to no particular audience and in no particular time or place; this being a poetical way of stating that he had written a great many articles in the Quarterly Review, of which these stanzas contain the substance. He tells, for example, how Dease and Simpson

Re-embarked on board, Mapped two successive years three hundred

miles

Three years' provisions in each ship are stored,
Three years, 'tis hoped, will bring them safely
back;

And all that arts inventive can afford,
Food, implements, ice-saws, crow's-nest, they
pack.

We have careful geographical details in
this fashion:-

Debarred both routes, still all the South re-
mained,

Thro' Regent Inlet or James Ross's Strait,
By which the continent could be attained.
After this, the poet takes his sailors com-
fortably down the Thames, introducing a
stanza upon Lord Palmerston, which he as-
sures us in a note "is not out of place," be-
cause he has just mentioned the heroic na-
ture of Englishmen; and, therefore, "as a
true exemplar of an English gentleman, a
few lines here are not irrelevant." Gradu-
ally we get to Stromness and to the Arctic
Seas, where, as the poet pathetically re-
marks:-
:-

Animal life abounds, the seal serene
Basks with his shining orbs, or huge whales
shake

The trembling wave, fowl feed, and walruses

awake.

If by the seal's "shining orbs" are meant his eyes, we should have preferred calling them fishy. Having got his adventurers safely to Beechey's Island, Mr. Brodie comes home, as he rather mysteriously tells us, " to drop his anchor in the Muse's port, and have his frail bark in strong iron cased, that soon must be by fiercest tempest chased, fronting all winter's utmost rage severe." What Mr. Brodie's bark means, or why it should be iron-cased, we have not the faintest idea. But we hope that the process won't enable him to make many more ventures in the poetical line.

Mr. Chorley's volume, if it does not attain any very high degree of excellence, is at least too good to be put in the same class with Mr. Brodie's. Mr. Chorley is evidently a man of taste, who, if he does not write very excellent poems, knows at any rate what poems ought to be. His verses do not give us the impression of having first been written in prose, then cut up into lengths of ten syllables, and finally twisted about forcibly into rhymes. They have a certain

a state either of somnambulism or of de-
moniacal possession; for, from a conversa-
tion of certain highly indefinite "voices" a
short time before, Mr. Chorley seems to at-
tribute this sleep-walking to a very ill-dis-
posed "Shadow," which makes the lights
burn blue. The lady walks up to the altar,
and, kneeling down before it, proceeds to
utter her "litany," which, it need hardly be
said, is not of a conciliatory tendency to
her husband. She prays, in fact, in a very
emphatic manner, that—

For the lips his breath has soiled,
On his lips be gall and blight;
And the worm that sleeps not, coiled
In his bosom day and night.

natural swing and harmony about them, thus pleasantly engaged enters the wife, in which shows that, if the writer had any very poetical ideas, they would not fail of expression for want of due power over language. We may, and in fact do, think them deficient in inspiration; but there is nothing in them grotesque, nor any absence of due polish. Mr. Chorley himself speaks very modestly about them. The chief poem, the "Wife's Litany," had, he says, been laid aside for several years, and when he accidentally found it again he thought it had "a certain character of its own sufficiently genuine to warrant its preservation." We do not dispute this verdict, as it is in fact rather difficult to say what exact degree of merit warrants the preservation of a poem. The most curious thing about it is After a good deal of this, the bell strikes the method of composition of which Mr. midnight, and the "unhallowed sprite" Chorley informs us. He seems, as we judge leaves her; she awakes, sees her lover lyfrom other pieces in the volume, to have a ing dead, and, what is indeed the only decided predilection for ghosts and the su- course open to her under the circumstances, pernatural generally. He says himself that falls on his body and dies herself; the the "source of the poem was derived from knight goes mad; and "the voices" inform that unknown region which lies beyond the us that the lady and her lover are going up to range of the mind's voluntary excursions heaven without further trouble. The varia mysterious province, every glimpse of ous scenes which lead up to this conclusion which I have long been accustomed to re- may be easily imagined. We certainly do gard with attention, not to say with reve- not envy Mr. Chorley his dreams, which are rence." Accordingly, Mr. Chorley favours unpleasantly suggestive of previous suppers. us with a ballad, something after the "An- Admitting, however, that poets have a right cient Mariner" fashion, where a dead man to deal in shadows and voices and wild steers a ship home, all its proper navigators huntsmen and other anomalous beings, the being killed off in a very disagreeable man- story is well enough told. The form, it apner. He finds the remains of an old wreck pears, is intended to be in imitation of in another ballad, and has a long and inter- Spanish comedy, and people who like to esting conversation with a ghost, who kind-read pretty verses about such unsubstantial ly gives him the particulars of the acsident by which it was lost, and ends by calling up the spirits of the rest of the crew, much as Admiral Hosier's injured ghost did in a parallel case. Mr. Chorley, then, having these propensities towards the superhuman, bad a dream. He saw "a vision of the night," in which the leading incidents of the "Wife's Litany" were presented "with Neither of the poems we have noticed such vivacity and completeness that, on can be considered as serious additions to waking, it was little more than an act our literature; but, as mathematicians say of memory to retrace the received impres- that one indefinitely small thing may bear sion." The dream which thus formed the an indefinitely great ratio to another, so nucleus of the poem appears, as we infer two poor poems may be incomparably differfrom the poem itself, to have been on ent in merit. Mr. Chorley is not a Shakthis wise. He saw an old chapel at mid- speare, nor even a Coleridge; but a talent night, in which a villanous knight, assisted for writing elegant verse without very much by his domestic chaplain and an evil-minded meaning, or very ambitious aim, is enough retainer, were burying a victim. This vic- to establish a vast difference between its tim would naturally be a gentleman who possessor and a writer of the unsuccessful had been in love with the knight's wife prize-poem order. It is worth while to combefore her marriage, and whom he had pare him with Mr. Brodie, in order to give taken the opportunity to murder comforta- him the gratitude due for what is, at first bly, with the chaplain's connivance, on his sight, the rather negative merit of not be unexpected reappearance. To the partying more prosaic than prose itself.

subjects may go through it without any danger of having their taste offended. We confess that dreamland seems to us to be rather too unsubstantial a district even to found poems upon; but Mr. Chorley may boast of having added one more to a list in which Kubla Khan is the only other example that we can at present remember.