Fearless, unveiled, and unattended
      Strolled maidens to and fro: 
   Youths looked respect, but never bended
      Obsequiously low.

   And each with other, sans condition,
      Held parley brief or long,
   Without provoking coarse suspicion
      Of marriage, or of wrong.

   All were well clad, and none were better,
      And gems beheld I none,
   Save where there hung a jewelled fetter,
      Symbolic, in the sun.

   I saw a noble-looking maiden
      Close Dante’s solemn book,
   And go, with crate of linen laden
      And wash it in the brook.

   Anon, a broad-browed poet, dragging
      A load of logs along,
   To warm his hearth, withal not flagging
      In current of his song.

   Each one some handicraft attempted
      Or helped to till the soil: 
   None but the aged were exempted
      From communistic toil.

Such an expression as ‘coarse suspicion of marriage’ is not very fortunate; the log-rolling poet of the fifth stanza is an ideal that we have already realised and one in which we had but little comfort, and the fourth stanza leaves us in doubt whether Mr. Austin means that washerwomen are to take to reading Dante, or that students of Italian literature are to wash their own clothes.  But, on the whole, though Mr. Austin’s vision of the citta divina of the future is not very inspiriting, it is certainly extremely interesting as a sign of the times, and it is evident from the two concluding lines of the following stanzas that there will be no danger of the intellect being overworked: 

   Age lorded not, nor rose the hectic
      Up to the cheek of youth;
   But reigned throughout their dialectic
      Sobriety of truth.

   And if a long-held contest tended
      To ill-defined result,
   It was by calm consent suspended
      As over-difficult.

Mr. Austin, however, has other moods, and, perhaps, he is at his best when he is writing about flowers.  Occasionally he wearies the reader by tedious enumerations of plants, lacking indeed reticence and tact and selection in many of his descriptions, but, as a rule, he is very pleasant when he is babbling of green fields.  How pretty these stanzas from the dedication are!

   When vines, just newly burgeoned, link
      Their hands to join the dance of Spring,
   Green lizards glisten from cleft and chink,
   And almond blossoms rosy pink
      Cluster and perch, ere taking wing;

   Where over strips of emerald wheat
      Glimmer red peach and snowy pear,
   And nightingales all day long repeat
   Their love-song, not less glad than sweet
      They chant in sorrow and gloom elsewhere;

   Where purple iris-banners scale
      Defending walls and crumbling ledge,
   And virgin windflowers, lithe and frail,
   Now mantling red, now trembling pale,
      Peep out from furrow and hide in hedge.