are the first and last stanzas of Mr. Todhunter’s poem The Banshee.  To throw away the natural grace of rhyme from a modern song is, as Mr. Swinburne once remarked, a wilful abdication of half the power and half the charm of verse, and we cannot say that Mr. Todhunter has given us much that consoles us for its loss.  Part of his poem reads like a translation of an old Bardic song, part of it like rough material for poetry, and part of it like misshapen prose.  It is an interesting specimen of poetic writing but it is not a perfect work of art.  It is amorphous and inchoate, and the same must be said of the two other poems, The Doom of the Children of Lir, and The Lamentation for the Sons of Turann.  Rhyme gives architecture as well as melody to song, and though the lovely lute-builded walls of Thebes may have risen up to unrhymed choral metres, we have had no modern Amphion to work such wonders for us.  Such a verse as—­

   Five were the chiefs who challenged
   By their deeds the Over-kingship,
   Bov Derg, the Daghda’s son, Ilbrac of Assaroe,
   And Lir of the White Field in the plain of Emain Macha;
   And after them stood up Midhir the proud, who reigned
   Upon the hills of Bri,
   Of Bri the loved of Liath, Bri of the broken heart;
   And last was Angus Og; all these had many voices,
   But for Bov Derg were most,

has, of course, an archaeological interest, but has no artistic value at all.  Indeed, from the point of view of art, the few little poems at the end of the volume are worth all the ambitious pseudo-epics that Mr. Todhunter has tried to construct out of Celtic lore.  A Bacchic Day is charming, and the sonnet on the open-air performance of The Faithfull Shepherdesse is most gracefully phrased and most happy in conception.

Mr. Peacock is an American poet, and Professor Thomas Danleigh Supplee, A.M., Ph.D., F.R.S., who has written a preface to his Poems of the Plains and Songs of the Solitudes, tells us that he is entitled to be called the Laureate of the West.  Though a staunch Republican, Mr. Peacock, according to the enthusiastic Professor, is not ashamed of his ancestor King William of Holland, nor of his relatives Lord and Lady Peacock who, it seems, are natives of Scotland.  He was brought up at Zanesville, Muskingum Co., Ohio, where his father edited the Zanesville Aurora, and he had an uncle who was ‘a superior man’ and edited the Wheeling Intelligencer.  His poems seem to be extremely popular, and have been highly praised, the Professor informs us, by Victor Hugo, the Saturday Review and the Commercial Advertiser.  The preface is the most amusing part of the book, but the poems also are worth studying.  The Maniac, The Bandit Chief, and The Outlaw can hardly be called light reading, but we strongly recommend the poem on Chicago: 

   Chicago! great city of the West! 
   All that wealth, all that power invest;
   Thou sprang like magic from the sand,
   As touched by the magician’s wand.