Miss Philipson's griefs, and regrets, and longings; and as the burden is always the same, it is impossible not to feel wearied by the oft-recurring tale, despite of the excellent poetry in which some of these " melancholics" are served up to us. One of the best poems in the book, almost the best, is the one in which the authoress has got fully out of herself. We quote a few verses from some of the selfmournings, and then this self-freed poem as a contrast :--

Hope is a faintly shining star

Whose beams ne'er light on me,
The palest where a thousand are
Glowing eternally;

But with a vain deceitful hue
Attracting every wanderer's view.

and the beginning of the very next poem :

And I am all alone-once more alone;

The dreams of other brighter hours have fled, My sad heart watches from her silent throne, O'er hopes, affections, withered now and dead.

And three or four pages on,

I cannot help these falling tears;
Nor can I force them back,-
They do but flow for vanished years
Faded from life's dim track.
If thou could'st feel the heavy load
This earth has cast on me,
Thou would'st not wonder that iny road
Is one of misery.

The rhythm and expression of these are good, and though the ideas are not very original, yet they are delicate; but the poetry of this which we have called the Self-freed Poem is infinitely better:

Sad was the parting and bitter the fear
When the farewell was spoke,
Fast in each dim eye did gather the tear,

As each from the other broke. But think what the rapturous hour will be When from the deep he returneth to thee.

We hope that Miss Philipson will apply to her own mind the lesson she gives her friend here, and we shall then hail her next book with pleasure. We will give her a title for it"Active Hours." One hour of doing in the present is better than a thousand spent in mourning over the future. Why does Miss Philipson,-so have we been asking ourselves all through the book,-why does she so weep her life out in melancholy song, when her poetry would be so well worth reading and thinking over, if by a little activity she would only impart to it an element of freshness and joy? He who works painfully thinks joyfully. The poetess who could write the "Thanksgiving for Home," and the following verse especially, will do much more if she will only shake off these melancholy fetters which jangle so drearily. This is a beautiful verse :-

Upon the mossy lawn my child may play,
As I did years ago,

And on her brow of snow
Sit undisturbed joy the livelong day.

Surrounded by this air of melancholy, and very much depressed therewith, we grasped "The Rose of Rostrevor," by Mr. Montgomerie, in hope of some relief. We were relieved indeed, but only to suffer more; for we passed from the lowlands of sorrow, to the very topmost peaks of absurdity. It is to these rapid transitions that we refer the intellectual ill health of many of our reviewers. No brain can long withstand being tossed from one state to another, like those unfortunates whose dark destiny transferred them to and fro between the horrid vale of fire and the thrilling regions of thick ribbed ice. For, verily, if Miss Philipson's book is melancholy, Mr. Montgomerie's is "midsummer madUnless for the purpose of exciting mirth, we cannot tell what use this book may serve. To imagine for the millionth part of a second

ness.

that it would be tolerated by even a fisherman of the Blasket Islands, shows an amount of vanity and incompetence which we should be sorry to attribute to any one of sound mind. If Sophocles proved his sanity by reading the celebrated chorus in the Colonæus, we venture to say that Mr. Montgomerie might with impunity indulge in any crime against the country whatsoever, for this book, entrusted to his lawyer, and read as the speech for the defence, would be sufficient to ensure him an acquittal. Yet, we know not; a second edition may be called for. There is a strange fascination in what is intolerably bad. It is worth while, however, to let our readers judge for themselves. It will at least show that the remarks at the beginning of this review are not without foundation. It will, more strongly than anything that we can say, let the public see the evil they are committing by encouraging and buying the books of every man who resolves on declaring his inability to the world.

The story is briefly this. Grace Montgomerie, the Rose of Rostrevor, married Marmaduke St. John in 1690. This production opens with the meeting of the newly married pair after a separation. Shortly after, St. John is called away to join the forces of William of Orange, and is taken prisoner by O'Dempsy, the celebrated Cahir-na-Coppal, at the battle of the Boyne, and carried to Lea Castle. His wife, with a devotion which deserves embalming in poetry, and which not even these rhymes can render absurd, travels on foot with one servant through the almost pathless forests which then covered Ireland, and succeeds in reaching the castle and in recovering her husband. The book closes with the death of O'Dempsy.

This is the farewell of St. John to his lady :

He strained her to his heart in saddened joy, With kisses stopped her plaint:-Then, boat ahoy!

This night, my life, I'll see thee once again At the Old Fort. To raise my stalwart men Now must I go :--swift, too, as oars can

And the comfort Nora administers to her mistress on hearing of the capture of St. John is conceived in a simple Homeric manner :-

Oh, dearest lady, speak; take not on so,
Sir Ronald is a prisoner, sure I know;
But I know also well where he is gone,
A nobler gentleman never the sun shone on.
"Ah Nora! Nora! folly naught avails;
I cannot listen now to Irish tales;
Leave me, and let me"-" No, dear lady,
dont.

Kill me they may; but leave you, 'deed I wont,

Now you will hear me, may I die in sin! But great O'Dempsy's of my kith and kin."

The welcome of Nora's sweetheart is equally close to the Irish character of the year 1690:

Turning at once, with anxious cheek and eye,
He bent full low in native courtesy:
In English words, but Irish idiom strange,
(Which to "plain jocks" appears to disarrange
Some strict dull meaning) he "welcomed
Lady Grace

To the Old Dun; a ruined shattered place,
Musha-machree, it is. Oh, Creestha cras!
If that my lady seen it as it was

In days hard bye, 'fore Crummel's bloody balls And powther bombs had smashed the holy walls,

May sweet bad luck attind him for his pains!

There is much more of this gross and intolerable caricature which we refrain from quoting; our readers doubtless wish for no more, and we can only say that in those parts where Mr. Montgomerie attempts the high epic range, he fails as much to represent the truth, as he has done in his delineation of the Irish character and manners of that time.

When we first opened "Grace and Remembrance," we expected that once more we were to be oppressed with a mass of useless and unsettled melancholy. Its title suggested to us those mournful retrospections with which the public are now being overwhelmed. On all the ledges and mountain paths of the present Parnassus we meet with figures muffled up like Hecuba in their robes, who, with ashes on their heads, are poring on the past, when with one effort, they might dash aside this self darkness, and meet the beautiful bold glance of

Apollo, and with some miles' hard climbing leave behind the shadows of grief, and stand on the double cone of the high poetic mountain, with the wind of a newer and a fresher youth upon their brow.

In this book we breathe a purer air than that of sickly sorrow. It is no individual memory that Mr. Gerard celebrates. It is a memory which is universal. It is a gracious song to him whose mighty heart responded to the sympathies of all men, and whose melody fills the years of time, as fully now as when of old he shook with all emotion the knights and dames of the court, where reigned the fair vestal throned by the west. It is the memory of Shakespeare, "the centre of a people's love."

It is strange and yet not strange, that none have ventured to approach with the reverence of song the throne where our king-poet sits amidst the veneration of the world. He is too high, too ideal, too acknowledged for the clang of trumpet-praise. It would be too material. The winged words of panegyric fall faint, and dazzled like Icarus, at his shining feet. His is the noblest, purest, highest praise the praise of golden silence. Johnson's lines, the best attempt, are too actual in expression, too rounded in their concentrated periods, too assuming, to satisfy the reverential heart of the world. There was but one way by which his greatness could be fully made known to us; by showing us that he, as we do, suffered, and sorrowed, rejoiced, and lived; that he shared in the common humanity of the species. For we lose the truth of his superiority when we idealize him too much. It is in feeling that he was the same in the depths of his nature as we, and yet raised high above us, that we realize most fully that majestic greatness.

In this mode Mr. Gerard has approached him. He has struck the true chord, and all true hearts will respond. It was something to do so, for if anything is more remarkable about Shakespeare than another, it is that so little of his everyday life is known to us. He is not so much to us a man as a voice. Mr. Gerard's poem has made him dearer to us. Here we feel that he suffered and rejoiced as we suffer and rejoice. Mr. Gerard

has made ny feel the brotherhood of

thank him. He has made approachable that complex and wondrous heart, which we all felt to be almost unapproachable. In the following lines he has made his sorrow for the death of his child, real to us; and that too with a true poetical intuition, and a gracious humility, which make Mr. Gerard-and what higher praise can we give?-worthy to sing the requiem of Shakespeare.

And thou hast mourned!

O! touching, tender thought, to biud
Us closer to the master mind;
Can it be true that sorrow dawned
On thee in any wise?

Can it be true those eagle eyes
Which seemed to pierce through distant space,
And worlds of fancy to embrace,

As in a moment's glance,

Once rested with a strange surprize

Upon a death-sealed face?

Did the low cry of anguish break
From thy rent heart, for his dear sake

Who lay in silent trance?
And did'st thou clasp, in speechless pain,
The slumberer calm and cold.
And look through sorrow's blinding rain
Upon a hand thou ne'er again
In life should'st hold?

O tender thought!

Could death into thy home be brought, And could his silent footfall wend

About thy house, across the door, Upon the stairs, along the floor,And none the chosen one defend?

Was there no respite, no reprieve! Or did suspended hours of doubt

The credulous heart deceive? Perchance thine eye was first to trace His "pale flag's" ghastly sign, On that wan form of youthful grace

Which owed its life to thine! Perchance thy wakeful ear descried

With what first sound, and low, The gates of life were opened wide

To let the spirit go:

And haply in that hour thy breast,

Oh shrine of ev'ry tender thought! Was the last couch thy darling pressed, In death his last support! How dids't thou deal with sorrow then,

When she with thee was left alone, When all the trite concerns of men,

The petty cares that life must own, Were deemed superfluous things? When silence, drooping mournful wings, Brooded above thy quiet home, And from the doorway arched and low A funeral train went forth in woe, As night would never come.

Alas the garish day betrayed Strange vacant places; here and there

A bad

ced an empty chair

stars which "die out from south to north;" the description in one of the latter poems of the nightingale breaking her heart with jealousy of the music which she hears, and yet, such is the beauty of the sounds, waiting till they cease, to die; the exquisite lines, which are like Shakespeare's in their intuitive truth and felicity,

The heart's deep joy is seldom stirred,
Yet at a touch it overflows;

all show such a clear poetic receptivity, and such a tenderness of sentiment, never deviating into unmanly sentimentality-such a deep perception of the beautiful, and the pure and gentle, joined with such condensed and manly thought; that we have no hesitation in saying that Mr. Gerard has done the public much service by publishing his book, and that we are thankful to him for putting us into a better humour with the poetical power of the age. To tell Mr. Gerard that he is a poet would be vain, for his own heart will tell him so; yet in one or two places his lines are weak, and convey no idea to the mind but the tritenesses of common poetry. In another, we should not mention this; in him it is a fault, for he must feel their insufficiency. Nevertheless, with head uncovered we bid him farewell; in minds like his we see the hope of the poetic idea. For we shall yet, when the evil reaction from the pure spiritualistic poetry of the time has passed away, advance to a yet higher land. We shall climb the upper earth which Plato sung of, far above the foggy valleys of sentimentality, and the gross materialism of the senses, and reach the many colored Home of Song, where the sea is pure as as air, and the air the poets breathe is the clear impalpable of the ether,

A FEW days before we left Nicosia we were admitted to an audience with his highness the Pasha.

We understood from our cicerone, Captain Jones, that some kind of present was indispensably necessary as a preliminary to the desired interview. This was a stumbling-block. A few pieces of coin held in the hand and presented to be touched, which would have done in India, would not do here. Something must be given, and the question was, what had we of sufficient value, or sufficiently curious, to answer the purpose. Again, was it worth while purchasing an article for presentation? Was the interview worth the probable outlay? After much consultation, and many balancings of the pros and cons of the matter, we were finally relieved of the difficulty by the ready wit of one of the ladies of our party. She had a worked scarf that had come from Delhi, and had been touched by his majesty the king of Delhi, the living representative of the Great Moguls. Its having been so touched was a small matter to us-to the Pasha and his wives it would be a matter of considerable importance.

It was not, however, without some lingering apprehension that our present was too insignificant in value, and that we were rendering ourselves ridiculous thereby, that we made our way through the outer court-yard to the pile of building which had been the palace of the Lusignans, the seat of the Venetian Proconsul, and was now the Serai of the Turkish Governor. The present was borne on a silver tray in front of us, and I had judiciously obtained the loan of a cover for it, in order that the prying eyes of the servants of the Serai might not discover its littleness. The salver, surmounted by a very elegant silver cover, looked imposing as it was borne along by one of our servants, through the centre of the court-yard. We fol

lowed it two by two-each of the first three gentlemen escorting a lady, for the wife of the captain accompanied us.

We passed the fountain, and drew nearer the grand entrance of the palace. A few steps led to the door. Two lines of servants, elegantly dressed, bowed as we drew near, each servant occupying a separate step. There was something imposing about the whole ceremony. I thought of the second-hand Delhi scarf upon the silver salver, and sighed mentally.

The hall, supported by marble columns, was large and imposing. It was hung round with weapons, ancient and modern, rather resembling the vestibule of a museum than of a palace. The lines of servants were here, too, alternating with soldiers. We mounted the grand stair-case in solemn silence-the silver dish ever preceding us.

At length folding doors were thrown open at the head of the staircase; some words in Turkish, to which I did not pay much attention, were uttered, and we were ushered into a kind of throne-room. It was comparatively empty and desertedlooking. A few officers of the Serai alone occupied it, stealing about noiselessly, speaking under their breath, and evidently awaiting the arrival of the Pasha. One of these spoke to Captain Jones. He was anxious to see one of our company who had served the King of Oude in Lucknow, for the captain had made the fact known previously. He was introduced, was told the Pasha had a great desire to see him, and was then left as before, standing awkwardly in front of the musnud or throne, with the rest of the party.

The room was probably sixty feet long by twenty or thirty wide. It was lit by lofty windows, which commenced about five or six feet from the ground. There was nothing that