This is our vengeance day.  Our masters made fat with our fasting Shall fall before us like corn when the sickle for harvest is strong:  Old wrongs shall give might to our arm, remembrance of wrongs shall make lasting The graves we will dig for our tyrants we bore with too much and too long.

The poem from which we take this stanza is remarkably vigorous, and the only consolation that we can offer to the timid and the Tories is that as long as so much strength is employed in blowing the trumpet, the sword, so far as Miss Nesbit is concerned, will probably remain sheathed.  Personally, and looking at the matter from a purely artistic point of view, we prefer Miss Nesbit’s gentler moments.  Her eye for Nature is peculiarly keen.  She has always an exquisite sense of colour and sometimes a most delicate ear for music.  Many of her poems, such as The Moat House, Absolution, and The Singing of the Magnificat are true works of art, and Vies Manquees is a little gem of song, with its dainty dancing measure, its delicate and wilful fancy and the sharp poignant note of passion that suddenly strikes across it, marring its light laughter and lending its beauty a terrible and tragic meaning.

From the sonnets we take this at random: 

   Not Spring—­too lavish of her bud and leaf—­
      But Autumn with sad eyes and brows austere,
      When fields are bare, and woods are brown and sere,
   And leaden skies weep their enchantless grief. 
   Spring is so much too bright, since Spring is brief,
      And in our hearts is Autumn all the year,
      Least sad when the wide pastures are most drear
   And fields grieve most—­robbed of the last gold sheaf.

These too, the opening stanzas of The Last Envoy, are charming: 

   The Wind, that through the silent woodland blows
   O’er rippling corn and dreaming pastures goes
      Straight to the garden where the heart of Spring
   Faints in the heart of Summer’s earliest rose.

   Dimpling the meadow’s grassy green and grey,
   By furze that yellows all the common way,
      Gathering the gladness of the common broom,
   And too persistent fragrance of the may—­

   Gathering whatever is of sweet and dear,
   The wandering wind has passed away from here,
      Has passed to where within your garden waits
   The concentrated sweetness of the year.

But Miss Nesbit is not to be judged by mere extracts.  Her work is too rich and too full for that.

Mr. Foster is an American poet who has read Hawthorne, which is wise of him, and imitated Longfellow, which is not quite so commendable.  His Rebecca the Witch is a story of old Salem, written in the metre of Hiawatha, with a few rhymes thrown in, and conceived in the spirit of the author of The Scarlet Letter.  The combination is not very satisfactory, but the poem, as a piece of fiction, has many elements of interest.