The reunion and the severance of lovers are presented in three poems.  Winter, chill without but warm within, with its pastimes of passion, the energies of joy breaking forth in play, is contrasted in A Lovers’ Quarrel with springtime, all gladness without and a strange void and shiver at the heart of things, because alienation has taken the place of camaraderie between the lover and his mistress.  The mass and intensity of colour in the stanza which dashes in a sketch of the Pampas, with its leagues of sunflowers, and a wild horse, “black neck and eyeballs keen” appearing through them, almost afflict the reader’s sense of sight.  There is a fine irony in the title of the other poem of contention, A Womans Last Word:  In a quarrel a woman will have the last word, and here it is—­the need of quietude for a little while that she may recover from the bewildering stroke of pain, and then entire oblivion of the wrong with unmeasured self-surrender.  The poem of union, Love among the Ruins, is constructed in a triple contrast; the endless pastures prolonged to the edge of sunset, with their infinity of calm, are contrasted with the vast and magnificent animation of the city which once occupied the plain and the mountain slopes.  The lover keeps at arm’s-length from his heart and brain what yet fills them all the while; here in this placid pasture-land is one vivid point of intensest life; here where once were the grandeur and tumult of the enormous city is that which in a moment can abolish for the lover all its glories and its shames.  His eager anticipation of meeting his beloved, face to face and heart to heart, is not sung, after the manner of Burns, as a jet of unmingled joy; he delays his rapture to make its arrival more entirely rapturous; he uses his imagination to check and to enhance his passion; and the poem, though not a simple cry of the heart, is entirely true as a rendering of emotion which has taken imagination into its service.  In like manner By the Fireside, A Serenade at the Villa, and Two in the Campagna, include certain studies of nature and its moods, sometimes with a curiously minute observation of details; and these serve as the overture to some intense moment of joy or pain, or form the orchestration which sustains or reinforces a human voice.

Of the pieces relating to art those connected with the art of poetry are the least valuable. Transcendentalism sets forth the old doctrine that poetry must be sensuous and passionate, leaving it to philosophy to deal with the naked abstractions of the intellect. How it strikes a Contemporary shows by a humorous example how a poet’s character and private life may be misconceived and misrepresented by those among whom he moves. Popularity maintains that the poet who is in the highest sense original, an inventor of new things, may be wholly disregarded for long, while his followers and imitators secure both the porridge