Mr. Hayes states the problem of life extremely well, but his solution is sadly inadequate both from a psychological and from a dramatic point of view.  David Westren ultimately becomes a mild Unitarian, a sort of pastoral Stopford Brooke with leanings towards Positivism, and we leave him preaching platitudes to a village congregation.  However, in spite of this commonplace conclusion there is a great deal in Mr. Hayes’s poem that is strong and fine, and he undoubtedly possesses a fair ear for music and a remarkable faculty of poetical expression.  Some of his descriptive touches of nature, such as

   In meeting woods, whereon a film of mist
   Slept like the bloom upon the purple grape,

are very graceful and suggestive, and he will probably make his mark in literature.

There is much that is fascinating in Mr. Rennell Rodd’s last volume, The Unknown Madonna and Other Poems.  Mr. Rodd looks at life with all the charming optimism of a young man, though he is quite conscious of the fact that a stray note of melancholy, here and there, has an artistic as well as a popular value; he has a keen sense of the pleasurableness of colour, and his verse is distinguished by a certain refinement and purity of outline; though not passionate he can play very prettily with the words of passion, and his emotions are quite healthy and quite harmless.  In Excelsis, the most ambitious poem in the book, is somewhat too abstract and metaphysical, and such lines as

   Lift thee o’er thy ‘here’ and ‘now,’
   Look beyond thine ‘I’ and ‘thou,’

are excessively tedious.  But when Mr. Rodd leaves the problem of the Unconditioned to take care of itself, and makes no attempt to solve the mysteries of the Ego and the non-Ego, he is very pleasant reading indeed.  A Mazurka of Chopin is charming, in spite of the awkwardness of the fifth line, and so are the verses on Assisi, and those on San Servolo at Venice.  These last have all the brilliancy of a clever pastel.  The prettiest thing in the whole volume is this little lyric on Spring: 

   Such blue of sky, so palely fair,
   Such glow of earth, such lucid air! 
   Such purple on the mountain lines,
   Such deep new verdure in the pines! 
   The live light strikes the broken towers,
   The crocus bulbs burst into flowers,
   The sap strikes up the black vine stock,
   And the lizard wakes in the splintered rock,
   And the wheat’s young green peeps through the sod,
   And the heart is touched with a thought of God;
   The very silence seems to sing,
   It must be Spring, it must be Spring!

We do not care for ‘palely fair’ in the first line, and the repetition of the word ‘strikes’ is not very felicitous, but the grace of movement and delicacy of touch are pleasing.

The Wind, by Mr. James Ross, is a rather gusty ode, written apparently without any definite scheme of metre, and not very impressive as it lacks both the strength of the blizzard and the sweetness of Zephyr.  Here is the opening: