’In many cases I have deliberately employed alliteration, believing that the music of a line is intensified thereby,’ says Mr. Kelly in the preface to his poems, and there is certainly no reason why Mr. Kelly should not employ this ‘artful aid.’  Alliteration is one of the many secrets of English poetry, and as long as it is kept a secret it is admirable.  Mr. Kelly, it must be admitted, uses it with becoming modesty and reserve and never suffers it to trammel the white feet of his bright and buoyant muse.  His volume is, in many ways, extremely interesting.  Most minor poets are at their best in sonnets, but with him it is not so.  His sonnets are too narrative, too diffuse, and too lyrical.  They lack concentration, and concentration is the very essence of a sonnet.  His longer poems, on the other hand, have many good qualities.  We do not care for Psychossolles, which is elaborately commonplace, but The Flight of Calliope has many charming passages.  It is a pity that Mr. Kelly has included the poems written before the age of nineteen.  Youth is rarely original.

Andiatorocte is the title of a volume of poems by the Rev. Clarence Walworth, of Albany, N.Y.  It is a word borrowed from the Indians, and should, we think, be returned to them as soon as possible.  The most curious poem of the book is called Scenes at the Holy Home: 

   Jesus and Joseph at work!  Hurra! 
   Sight never to see again,
   A prentice Deity plies the saw,
   While the Master ploughs with the plane.

Poems of this kind were popular in the Middle Ages when the cathedrals of every Christian country served as its theatres.  They are anachronisms now, and it is odd that they should come to us from the United States.  In matters of this kind we should have some protection.

(1) Lays and Legends.  By E. Nesbit. (Longmans, Green and Co.)

(2) Rebecca the Witch and Other Tales.  By David Skaats Foster. (G.  P. Putnam’s Sons.)

(3) Poems and Songs.  By John Renton Denning. (Bombay:  Education Society’s Press.)

(4) Poems.  By Joseph McKim. (Kegan Paul.)

(5) In the Watches of the Night.  Poems in eighteen volumes.  By Mrs. Horace Dobell.  Vol. xvii. (Remington and Co.)

(6) Poems.  By James Kelly. (Glasgow:  Reid and Coghill.)

(7) Andiatorocte.  By the Rev. Clarence A. Walworth. (G.  P. Putnam’s Sons.)

A NOTE ON SOME MODERN POETS

(Woman’s World, December 1888.)

‘If I were king,’ says Mr. Henley, in one of his most modest rondeaus,

’Art should aspire, yet ugliness be dear;
Beauty, the shaft, should speed with wit for feather;
And love, sweet love, should never fall to sere,

            If I were king.’