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a dear pretty little angel, the sweetest child that ever was born! Will you go and be a companion to her, and make her a happier child, my love?"

The old lady spoke so warmly and quickly, that "therewithal the water stood in her eyes." To all this Zaidee answered by a long wistful look. "If any one would take me abroad, I should be very, very glad," she said, when she turned her eyes from Mrs Burtonshaw; but she did not know how to reply to this, about being a companion, and making happy-it was not in Zaidee's way.

"She is the very person," cried Mrs Lancaster, in a voice of great relief. Once put in the way of mortifying the Disbrowes, and especially

Edward's wife," by the exaltation of Zaidee, Mrs Lancaster was quite herself again. "She will do admirably; that is, if we can be satisfied about her friends."

"My dear," said Mrs Burtonshaw, "are you sure you would like to go with me? It is a long way off-a place where there are scarcely any English, and the family travel about a great deal; but Mary is the sweetest little

love. My darling child, she will make you so happy!"

Zaidee looked up with sudden wonder. She thought of Mrs Wyburgh and of Nurse, who alone had called her "darling" before; but it was all to be put to the account of the unknown Mary, this burst of affection for the girl who might be her companion. Her wistful dark eyes began to smile upon the old lady; it was almost the first time they had been moved with this gentle relaxation since she came from home. Involuntarily Zaidee, who had learned the lessons of respect and humility becoming a dependant only very slightly, and who underneath had all the simple trustfulness of a child, came to Mrs Burtonshaw's footstool, and sat down there. "Will you tell me about Mary?" said Zaidee, looking up with all her old eagerness for a story. She did not hear that Mrs Lancaster suggested" Miss Cumberland." Zaidee knew nothing of Miss Cumberland; she wanted to hear of this unknown girl, who was held in so much love.

And thus it was that Zaidee's heart awoke to the clear light of common life again.

POETRY OF THE WAR.

REVIEWED BEFORE SEBASTOPOL.

FANCY, reader, the son of Peleus, the white-haired Nestor, and the sage Ulysses, reading, towards the close of the first year of their sojourn before Troy, the first book of the Iliad, to be continued in parts as a serial. Poetry, whose high office is to select and combine in order to exalt, would do for them the refining work of time. The squalid scenes of the camp and the work-a-day operations of the siege would vanish from their mental picture; they would become heroes to themselves; each would begin to believe he had seen the gods of Olympus mingling in the fray, and every Greek who had experienced a touch of cholera, would be ready to swear by the Styx that he had heard the twanging of the silver bow, and felt the sharp arrow of the vengeful archergod.

Such is the fortune of the besiegers of our modern Ilium. The parallel in men does not altogether hold good. Nestors we have, unfortunately, rather too many of. Ulysses is, perhaps, less numerously represented in the Allied camp; while Pelides, Diomed, and the greater Ajax, would meet their match in the first trio of guardsmen whom you happened to see cooking their salt pork. Penelope may now silence too-pressing suitors by pointing to the gazette, which shows that Ithaca has still a king and she a lord. But men and women are much the same now as in those dim days, and we who sit before Sebastopol may form some idea of the feelings of those ancient warriors, could they have seen their own deeds chronicled in the immortal verse of the blind old man. Scenes of the campaign glow and expand in the pictures of an imaginative "own correspondent" writing up to the requirements of an excited public. The poet, catching the enthusiasm, burns to sing of the war. Fancy and invention he need not call on for aid, as those elements of poetry have already done their utmost in the columns of the newspaper he subscribes to. Nothing

VOL. LXXVII.-NO. CCCCLXXV.

is wanting but verse; and his eye, in a fine frenzy rolling, glances from the Times to a quire of foolscap, which he presently covers with ballads, sonnets, or some other form of lay, plaintive as the odes of Sappho, or sanguinary as the songs of Tyrtæus. Thus it happens that (notwithstanding the Postoffice authorities have made arrangements for the suppression of newspapers and small parcels) we receive, with tolerable speed and regularity, commentaries from home upon our doings; and not only does the council of chiefs find its deliberations aided by the ever unerring vox populi, but the Crimean Achilles reads the inspiring stanzas which tell of his own deeds in the last battle, before the blood has rusted on his bayonet; while (alas that it should be often so!) the British Laodamia hears her wail for the lost Protesilaus echoed with bewildering iteration in musical

verse.

It is both amusing and satisfactory to find our young versifiers taking this line. When last Maga took occasion to notice the work of a rising poet, he was steering a widely different course. Maudlin imitations of passion, such as a tragedian at a minor theatre might utter, when the effects of the overdose of gin with which he had refreshed himself after the laborious representation of the Amorous Tyrant were beginning to wear off, and retributive seediness was overshadowing him-suicide defended in the case of a dumb poet, big with magnificent ideas, but unable to express them, the latter fact being probably his very best title to a prolonged existence-formed part of the episodes; while the great yearning of the poet himself was to set this age to music-the age, not, as it appears now, with its armour on, "mailed and horsed with lance and sword," but a drab-coloured, broad-brimmed era, whose fitting poet would be a gentleman having an eye at once to the beauties of nature and to commercial 2 M

pursuits, celebrating the glories of steam and cotton to the accompaniment of an oaten pipe-a kind of union of Corydon and Cobden, whose religious creed was, that he got nearer to heaven as the distance by rail was shortened between London and Manchester.

War, long shuddered at as chief of evils, which has brought desolation to so many homes, and still fills with rending anxiety so many hearts, has not been without its benefits. At the sound of the trumpet England is aroused, and knows she has been dreaming, while the nightmares that oppressed her shrink gibbering away. Long-forgotten words are on her lips; but her voice sounds more natural now than when her talk was all of progress and peace; long-dormant feelings, lending colour to her cheek and fire to her eye, tell us that she is still the England of history. And, seeing this, we feel less indignant at him whose ambition caused the war, and forbear to dwell on the idea of the thousands of ghosts dabbled in blood who may well be supposed to flit avengingly round him as he enters the dark Monarchy.

Our

Not in the days of the Crusades was the warlike spirit more apparent than now. Peter the Hermit would be far more indulgently listened to by an English audience than Mr Bright. Beauties in English ball-rooms turn impatiently from essenced exquisites, neglecting the soft nothings whispered in their ears, to think of ragged, hairy, and not particularly cleanlooking individuals three thousand miles off, less respectable in appearance than many mendicants they have thrown a sixpence to. bards, no longer waiting the advent of the supernatural genius who is to detect the elements of poetry in the mechanical discoveries of the age and in the art of money-making, have become veritable troubadours, and find in those decried qualities, fortitude and valour, the materials of song. To say the truth, the lays of these minstrels smack somewhat of the age we have been living in-the native hue of resolution is sicklied o'er rather too biliously with the pale cast of thought. The philosophy and

hos of the horrors of war are

dwelt on somewhat to the exclusion of the martial spirit which should ring through the subject like the sound of a trumpet. In the "Lays of the Scottish Cavaliers," and the "Lays of Ancient Rome," models which the poets of the war would do well to study, there is far more ardour than philosophy. Small meditative power is visible in Dibdin; but when Jack thought of the saucy Arethusa, the flag of that Frenchman upon whom he was bearing down was as good as struck.

The lines which ring the truest among those we have seen are some purporting to be written by Corporal John Brown, on the battle of the Alma, whose verses have become popular in a song. Among the many good pieces which have appeared in newspapers, mostly less effusive than meditative, was one in blank verse in the Illustrated News, called "Looking Death in the Face," which showed remarkable power. Only two of the many books of verse on the war have reached our hut-Alma and Other Poems, by R. C. Trench-and Sonnets on the War, by Alexander Smith and the author of Balder. We have read them with the accompaniment of the frequent guns which have "lent to the rhyme of the poet the beauty of their voice," and, considering their subject, it would be ungracious to review them in other than a kindly spirit.

The lines to the river Alma, by Mr Trench, are very good, and have a fine roll about them. If the translation into Greek on the next page was made for the benefit of military readers, we must suggest to Mr Trench that the slenderness of a war-kit forbids us to carry lexicons, and we must continue to avail ourselves of the vernacular. "Sunday, November the Fifth," is very well done, and the contrast between the English Sabbath and the long day of desperate battle throws each into stronger relief. If our efforts on that day have called forth such feelings as the close of the poem intimates, the reward is indeed worth fighting for. "The Unforgotten" is a graceful tribute to the memory of those who, though they died not with "the light of battle shining on their brows,"

died none the less for duty and their country. Altogether, Mr Trench is the pleasantest excavation we have met with for many months past.

Among the jointly-produced sonnets are some which we don't understand, and therefore cannot conscientiously speak of. There are others which we only think we understand, and, therefore, will also leave unnoticed, for fear of going off on a wrong tack. Of the rest, there are some we like and some we don't like. To say the truth, spite of the great examples of Petrarch, Milton, and Wordsworth, we have never learned to like the sonnet, to which ideas generally seem to us to be adapted by a process somewhat Procrustean. A sonorous commencement sometimes leads to a feeble close, the thought having been improvidently expended in the first halfdozen lines, while the remainder throng in as impertinently as the ragged little boys who close the procession of some great man's funeral; or, again, after beating about the bush for thirteen lines, the poet, in the fourteenth, plunges desperately in and starts the game while we are all looking another way. It is as if a man had but one carpet-bag for all his occasions, and at one time crammed it to overflowing, heels of boots and corners of parcels sticking out on each side of the strained lock, and stitches giving way in all directions; while, at another, its collapsed recesses contain only a false collar and a tooth-brush.

A line in the prefatory sonnet first arrested our attention, and made us feel as giddy as when the clown in a pantomime crosses the stage in one unbroken string of summersets

"A whirlwind whirled across the whirling

land."

After this we closed our eyes for a minute or two, under the impression that the centrifugal force had suddenly got it all its own way, and we had gone blundering off into space among the planets. On recovering our accustomed steadiness of brain, we got on as far as "The Crystal Palace." After describing the "hall of glass," the very headquarters and house of representatives of our brief millennium, the sonnetteer asks

"Why did no one teach

That that fallacious future, smiling fair, Hid watchfires burning on a hostile beach ?" Why indeed? unless the teachers had money in the Funds, and wanted to sell out before they sunk. Or, another reason may be, that nobody (unless it be Mr Thomas Carlyle) likes to make his appearance in the character of Cassandra, when he may gain so much more credit as a soothsayer by adapting his prophesies to the taste of the public. Our own individual better judgment was so far overpowered by the prevailing current of opinion, that, before the war broke out, we had been for some time in the habit of secretly attending meetings of the Peace Society (in plain clothes, of course, as we didn't wish to provoke ill-treatment), and were actually in treaty with a Jew for the sale of our sword and epaulets, intending to set up a small retail shop for ginger-beer at Sydenham. The result of that enterprise would probably have been that we should now be receiving parish relief, while the man who stood next us on the ArmyList was revelling in flannels and muffetees, sent him by charitable ladies who looked on us as a mere uninteresting civilian ruined by speculation.

We think the simile of the raw brood of birds thrusting up their heads, in "The Army Surgeon," is to be found in Dante; and we don't like the sonnets on "The Wounded"-the line in French closing the second is burlesque. "Home" embodies, somewhat fantastically, an idea full of pathos. The conclusion is very pretty, except for the epithet carrion," which is altogether vile :

66

"Then she touches a sweet string Of soft recall, and towards the Eastern hill Smiles all her soul-for him who cannot hear The raven croaking at his carrion ear."

The same idea has been forcibly expressed in a stanza of Tennyson's In Memoriam

"O mother! praying God to save

Thy sailor-while thy head is bow'd, His heavy-shotted hammock-shroud Drops in his vast and wandering grave." The sonnet to Miss Nightingale is, as the subject requires, altogether graceful and good, and winds up with a beautiful image :

"How must the soldier's tearful heart ex-
pand,

Who from a long and obscure dream of pain-
His foeman's frown imprinted in his brain-
Wakes to thy healing face and dewy hand!
When this great noise hath roll'd from off
the land,

When all those fallen Englishmen of ours
Have bloomed and faded in Crimean flowers,
Thy perfect charity unsoiled shall stand.
Some pitying student of a nobler age,
Lingering o'er this year's half-forgotten page,
Shall see its beauty smiling ever there;
Surprised to tears, his beating heart he stills,
Like one who finds among Athenian hills
A temple, like a lily, white and fair.”

So, of late, we saw in the great hospital of Scutari, amidst rows of sick and wounded, her of the "healing face and dewy hand."

In blustering contrast with the quiet grace of the foregoing is "Sebastopol," which a Yankee would describe as resembling an "earthquake tipt with thunder and lightning." It begins with sound and fury

Blaze gun to gun along the roaring steep!
Ram home, ram home!"

"The useless sun is in the deep! Fire on this hour shall end them, son and sire."

A most sanguinary sentiment! — a
most unchristian sonnetteer! — but
his bark is, we are persuaded, worse
than his bite, and he would give
quarter.

"Fire on the scorching city is a heap!
The bastions reel, the toppling turrets leap!"
Hard times for the garrison, who
would certainly be justified in evacu-
ating works guilty of such unaccount-
able gambols.

"Advance! The boiling waters rage and
rave,

And the white foam flouts heaven. High, higher! See

The drowning streets. High, higher! Who

can save?

The flood the flood! A deluge and a grave."

If Mr Smith wrote this, we should say he never wrote anything approaching nearer to rant; if it was the other gentleman, we would say to him, in the words of Cedric the Saxon, "Down, Balder, down! I am not

(Our poet must have been born under in the humour for foolery." Aries.)

"Knee-deep in living mire."

What does the poet mean by insinuating in America that the Yankees speak our language? Are not the tongues wide asunder as the

Why living? "Run like cold demons thro' the hell of fire, language of Samuel Johnson and And feed the gulfs of flame!"

All our most cherished ideas of demons are upset by the epithet. A printer's devil shivering, in January, on the inhospitable doorstep of a tardy author, waiting for copy, while an east wind shrivels him to the marrow, may in some sort, by a kind of paraphrase, be called a cold demon; but we see not the affinity he bears to the British soldier in battle. We have always been given to understand that the inhabitants of those ultra-tropical regions, the gulfs of flame, were of particularly warm temperaments. We would not enter on our list of friends the man who conceived the idea of a cold demon, because he would be capable of asking us to breakfast, and giving us cold grill.

"We have burned sleep And night!" Most extraordinary combustibles, and over issued to the army as fuel that now of.

Samuel Slick? In "A Statesman" the storm. O for one like the great the poet demands a pilot to weather Commoner, the effigy on whose tomb eagle face and outstretched hand to seems still, as Macaulay says, with bid England be of good cheer, and to hurl defiance at her foes." "Austrian

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Alliance," besides being impolitic and
untimely, is bad poetry. "War'
In "Cheer"
conveys a stern but necessary moral.
our departed Duke is
end the sonnet are among the best in
worthily alluded to, and the lines that

the book

"Before us, to the unseen close, The future stretches without bound or mark, And England, fearless, sails across the dark, Leaving a trail of splendour as she goes."

"Childless," like "Home," conveys a touching image, and is, like it, a little injured by fantastic expression. Nevertheless it is very pretty, pathetic, and true, and would, we think, be found by many a bereaved "grey pale dame not unconsoling;

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