This spring the little singers are out before the little sparrows and have already begun chirruping.  Here are four volumes already, and who knows how many more will be given to us before the laburnums blossom?  The best-bound volume must, of course, have precedence.  It is called Echoes of Memory, by Atherton Furlong, and is cased in creamy vellum and tied with ribbons of yellow silk.  Mr. Furlong’s charm is the unsullied sweetness of his simplicity.  Indeed, we can strongly recommend to the School-Board the Lines on the Old Town Pump as eminently suitable for recitation by children.  Such a verse, for instance, as: 

   I hear the little children say
      (For the tale will never die)
   How the old pump flowed both night and day
      When the brooks and the wells ran dry,

has all the ring of Macaulay in it, and is a form of poetry which cannot possibly harm anybody, even if translated into French.  Any inaccurate ideas of the laws of nature which the children might get from the passage in question could easily be corrected afterwards by a lecture on Hydrostatics.  The poem, however, which gives us most pleasure is the one called The Dear Old Knocker on the Door.  It is appropriately illustrated by Mr. Tristram Ellis.  We quote the concluding verses of the first and last stanzas: 

   Blithe voices then so dear
      Send up their shouts once more,
   Then sounds again on mem’ry’s ear
      The dear old knocker on the door.
      . . . . . 
   When mem’ry turns the key
   Where time has placed my score,
   Encased ’mid treasured thoughts must be
   The dear old knocker on the door.

The cynic may mock at the subject of these verses, but we do not.  Why not an ode on a knocker?  Does not Victor Hugo’s tragedy of Lucrece Borgia turn on the defacement of a doorplate?  Mr. Furlong must not be discouraged.  Perhaps he will write poetry some day.  If he does we would earnestly appeal to him to give up calling a cock ‘proud chanticleer.’  Few synonyms are so depressing.

Having been lured by the Circe of a white vellum binding into the region of the pump and doormat, we turn to a modest little volume by Mr. Bowling of St. John’s College, Cambridge, entitled Sagittulae.  And they are indeed delicate little arrows, for they are winged with the lightness of the lyric and barbed daintily with satire.  AEsthesis and Athletes is a sweet idyll, and nothing can be more pathetic than the Tragedy of the XIX.  Century, which tells of a luckless examiner condemned in his public capacity to pluck for her Little-go the girl graduate whom he privately adores.  Girton seems to be having an important influence on the Cambridge school of poetry.  We are not surprised.  The Graces are the Graces always, even when they wear spectacles.