Then comes Tuberose and Meadowsweet, by Mr. Mark Andre Raffalovich.  This is really a remarkable little volume, and contains many strange and beautiful poems.  To say of these poems that they are unhealthy and bring with them the heavy odours of the hothouse is to point out neither their defect nor their merit, but their quality merely.  And though Mr. Raffalovich is not a wonderful poet, still he is a subtle artist in poetry.  Indeed, in his way he is a boyish master of curious music and of fantastic rhyme, and can strike on the lute of language so many lovely chords that it seems a pity he does not know how to pronounce the title of his book and the theme of his songs.  For he insists on making ‘tuberose’ a trisyllable always, as if it were a potato blossom and not a flower shaped like a tiny trumpet of ivory.  However, for the sake of his meadowsweet and his spring-green binding this must be forgiven him.  And though he cannot pronounce ‘tuberose’ aright, at least he can sing of it exquisitely.

Finally we come to Sturm und Drang, the work of an anonymous writer.  Opening the volume at hazard we come across these graceful lines: 

   How sweet to spend in this blue bay
   The close of life’s disastrous day,
   To watch the morn break faintly free
   Across the greyness of the sea,
   What time Memnonian music fills
   The shadows of the dewy hills.

Well, here is the touch of a poet, and we pluck up heart and read on.  The book is a curious but not inartistic combination of the mental attitude of Mr. Matthew Arnold with the style of Lord Tennyson.  Sometimes, as in The Sicilian Hermit, we get merely the metre of Locksley Hall without its music, merely its fine madness and not its fine magic.  Still, elsewhere there is good work, and Caliban in East London has a great deal of power in it, though we do not like the adjective ‘knockery’ even in a poem on Whitechapel.

On the whole, to those who watch the culture of the age, the most interesting thing in young poets is not so much what they invent as what masters they follow.  A few years ago it was all Mr. Swinburne.  That era has happily passed away.  The mimicry of passion is the most intolerable of all poses.  Now, it is all Lord Tennyson, and that is better.  For a young writer can gain more from the study of a literary poet than from the study of a lyrist.  He may become the pupil of the one, but he can never be anything but the slave of the other.  And so we are glad to see in this volume direct and noble praise of him

* * * * *

   Who plucked in English meadows flowers fair
   As any that in unforgotten stave
   Vied with the orient gold of Venus’ hair
   Or fringed the murmur of the AEgean wave,

which are the fine words in which this anonymous poet pays his tribute to the Laureate.

(1) Echoes of Memory.  By Atherton Furlong. (Field and Tuer.)