Her screams alarmed the Squire, who seeing the peril of his daughter, rode frantic after her.  I saw at once the danger, and stepping from the footpath, show’d myself before the startled animal, which forthwith slackened pace, and darting up adroitly, I seized the rein, and in another moment, had released the maiden’s foot, and held her, all insensible, within my arms.  Poor girl, her head and face were sorely bruised, and I tried hard to staunch the blood which flowed from many a scalp-wound, and wipe away the dust that disfigured her lovely features.  In another moment the Squire was by my side.  ’Poor child,’ he cried, alarmed, ‘is she dead?’ ’No, sir; not dead, I think,’ said I, ‘but sorely bruised and injured.’

There is clearly nothing to be gained by dividing the sentences of this simple and straightforward narrative into lines of unequal length, and Mr. Barker’s own arrangement of the metre,

In another moment,
The Squire was by my side. 
‘Poor child,’ he cried, alarmed, ‘is she dead?’
‘No, sir; not dead, I think,’ said I,
‘But sorely bruised and injured,’

seems to us to be quite inferior to ours.  We beg that the second edition of The Pilgrimage of Memory may be issued as a novel in prose.

Mr. Gladstone Turner believes that we are on the verge of a great social cataclysm, and warns us that our cradles are even now being rocked by slumbering volcanoes!  We hope that there is no truth in this statement, and that it is merely a startling metaphor introduced for the sake of effect, for elsewhere in the volume there is a great deal of beauty which we should be sorry to think was doomed to immediate extinction.  The Choice, for instance, is a charming poem, and the sonnet on Evening would be almost perfect if it were not for an unpleasant assonance in the fifth line.  Indeed, so good is much of Mr. Gladstone Turner’s work that we trust he will give up rhyming ‘real’ to ‘steal’ and ‘feel,’ as such bad habits are apt to grow on careless poets and to blunt their ear for music.

Nivalis is a five-act tragedy in blank verse.  Most plays that are written to be read, not to be acted, miss that condensation and directness of expression which is one of the secrets of true dramatic diction, and Mr. Schwartz’s tragedy is consequently somewhat verbose.  Still, it is full of fine lines and noble scenes.  It is essentially a work of art, and though, as far as language is concerned, the personages all speak through the lips of the poet, yet in passion and purpose their characters are clearly differentiated, and the Queen Nivalis and her lover Giulio are drawn with real psychological power.  We hope that some day Mr. Schwartz will write a play for the stage, as he has the dramatic instinct and the dramatic imagination, and can make life pass into literature without robbing it of its reality.

(1) The Queen’s Innocent, with Other Poems.  By Elise Cooper. (David Stott.)