Mr. Foster seems to be quite popular in America.  The Chicago Times finds his fancies ‘very playful and sunny,’ and the Indianapolis Journal speaks of his ‘tender and appreciative style.’  He is certainly a clever story-teller, and The Noah’s Ark (which ’somehow had escaped the sheriff’s hand’) is bright and amusing, and its pathos, like the pathos of a melodrama, is a purely picturesque element not intended to be taken too seriously.  We cannot, however, recommend the definitely comic poems.  They are very depressing.

Mr. John Renton Denning dedicates his book to the Duke of Connaught, who is Colonel-in-Chief of the Rifle Brigade, in which regiment Mr. Denning was once himself a private soldier.  His poems show an ardent love of Keats and a profligate luxuriance of adjectives: 

   And I will build a bower for thee, sweet,
   A verdurous shelter from the noonday heat,
   Thick rustling ivy, broad and green, and shining,
   With honeysuckle creeping up and twining
   Its nectared sweetness round thee; violets
   And daisies with their fringed coronets
   And the white bells of tiny valley lilies,
   And golden-leaved narcissi—­daffodillies
   Shall grow around thy dwelling—­luscious fare
   Of fruit on which the sun has laughed;

this is the immature manner of Endymion with a vengeance and is not to be encouraged.  Still, Mr. Denning is not always so anxious to reproduce the faults of his master.  Sometimes he writes with wonderful grace and charm.  Sylvia, for instance, is an exceedingly pretty poem, and The Exile has many powerful and picturesque lines.  Mr. Denning should make a selection of his poems and publish them in better type and on better paper.  The ‘get-up’ of his volume, to use the slang phrase of our young poets, is very bad indeed, and reflects no credit on the press of the Education Society of Bombay.

The best poem in Mr. Joseph McKim’s little book is, undoubtedly, William the Silent.  It is written in the spirited Macaulay style: 

   Awake, awake, ye burghers brave! shout, shout for joy and sing! 
   With thirty thousand at his back comes forth your hero King. 
   Now shake for ever from your necks the servile yoke of Spain,
   And raise your arms and end for aye false Alva’s cruel reign. 
   Ho!  Maestricht, Liege, Brussels fair! pour forth your warriors brave,
   And join your hands with him who comes your hearths and homes to save.

Some people like this style.

Mrs. Horace Dobell, who has arrived at her seventeenth volume of poetry, seems very angry with everybody, and writes poems to A Human Toad with lurid and mysterious footnotes such as—­’Yet some one, not a friend of —–­ did! on a certain occasion of a glib utterance of calumnies, by —–! at Hampstead.’  Here indeed is a Soul’s Tragedy.