’Green still it is, where that fair goddess strays;
      Then follow, till around thee all be sere. 
   Lose not a vision of her passing face;
      Nor miss the sound of her soft robes, that here
   Sweep over the wet leaves of the fast-falling year.’

The second line is very beautiful, and the whole shows culture and taste and feeling.  Mr. Ghose ought some day to make a name in our literature.

Mr. Stephen Phillips has a more solemn classical Muse.  His best work is his Orestes: 

   Me in far lands did Justice call, cold queen
   Among the dead, who, after heat and haste
   At length have leisure for her steadfast voice,
   That gathers peace from the great deeps of hell. 
   She call’d me, saying:  I heard a cry by night! 
   Go thou, and question not; within thy halls
   My will awaits fulfilment.

. . . . . .

      And she lies there,
   My mother! ay, my mother now; O hair
   That once I play’d with in these halls!  O eyes
   That for a moment knew me as I came,
   And lighten’d up, and trembled into love;
   The next were darkened by my hand!  Ah me! 
   Ye will not look upon me in that world. 
   Yet thou, perchance, art happier, if thou go’st
   Into some land of wind and drifting leaves,
   To sleep without a star; but as for me,
   Hell hungers, and the restless Furies wait.

Milton, and the method of Greek tragedy are Mr. Phillips’s influences, and again we may say, what better influences could a young singer have?  His verse is dignified, and has distinction.

* * * * *

Mr. Cripps is melodious at times, and Mr. Binyon, Oxford’s latest Laureate, shows us in his lyrical ode on Youth that he can handle a difficult metre dexterously, and in this sonnet that he can catch the sweet echoes that sleep in the sonnets of Shakespeare: 

   I cannot raise my eyelids up from sleep,
   But I am visited with thoughts of you;
   Slumber has no refreshment half so deep
   As the sweet morn, that wakes my heart anew.

   I cannot put away life’s trivial care,
   But you straightway steal on me with delight: 
   My purest moments are your mirror fair;
   My deepest thought finds you the truth most bright

   You are the lovely regent of my mind,
   The constant sky to the unresting sea;
   Yet, since ’tis you that rule me, I but find
   A finer freedom in such tyranny.

   Were the world’s anxious kingdoms govern’d so,
   Lost were their wrongs, and vanish’d half their woe!

On the whole Primavera is a pleasant little book, and we are glad to welcome it.  It is charmingly ‘got up,’ and undergraduates might read it with advantage during lecture hours.

Primavera:  Poems.  By Four Authors. (Oxford:  B. H. Blackwell.)

INDEX OF AUTHORS AND BOOKS REVIEWED