Enter ADAM.

   ADAM (excitedly).  Eve, where art thou?

   EVE (surprised).  Oh!

   ADAM (in astonishment).  Eve! my God, she’s there
   Beside that fatal tree;

or—­

   Enter ADAM and EVE.

   EVE (in astonishment).  Well, is not this surprising?

   ADAM (distracted).  It is—­

seem to belong rather to the sphere of comedy than to that of serious verse.  Poor Glenessa! the gods have not made him poetical, and we hope he will abandon his wooing of the muse.  He is fitted, not for better, but for other things.

Vortigern and Rowena is a cantata about the Britons and the Danes.  There is a Druid priestess who sings of Cynthia and Endymion, and a chorus of jubilant Vikings.  It is charmingly printed, and as a libretto for music quite above the average.

As truly religious people are resigned to everything, even to mediocre poetry, there is no reason at all why Madame Guyon’s verses should not be popular with a large section of the community.  Their editor, Mr. Dyer, has reprinted the translations Cowper made for Mr. Bull, added some versions of his own and written a pleasing preface about this gentle seventeenth-century saint whose life was her best, indeed her only true poem.

Mr. Pierce has discovered a tenth muse and writes impassioned verses to the Goddess of Chess whom he apostrophises as ‘Sublime Caissa’!  Zukertort and Steinitz are his heroes, and he is as melodious on mates as he is graceful on gambits.  We are glad to say, however, that he has other subjects, and one of his poems beginning: 

   Cedar boxes deeply cut,
      China bowls of quaint device,
      Heap’d with rosy leaves and spice,
   Violets in old volumes shut—­

is very dainty and musical.

Mr. Clifford Harrison is well known as the most poetic of our reciters, but as a writer himself of poetry he is not so famous.  Yet his little volume In Hours of Leisure contains some charming pieces, and many of the short fourteen-line poems are really pretty, though they are very defective in form.  Indeed, of form Mr. Harrison is curiously careless.  Such rhymes as ‘calm’ and ‘charm,’ ‘baize’ and ‘place,’ ‘jeu’ and ‘knew,’ are quite dreadful, while ‘operas’ and ‘stars,’ ‘Gautama’ and ‘afar’ are too bad even for Steinway Hall.  Those who have Keats’s genius may borrow Keats’s cockneyisms, but from minor poets we have a right to expect some regard to the ordinary technique of verse.  However, if Mr. Harrison has not always form, at least he has always feeling.  He has a wonderful command over all the egotistic emotions, is quite conscious of the artistic value of remorse, and displays a sincere sympathy with his own moments of sadness, playing upon his moods as a young lady plays upon the piano.  Now and then we come across some delicate descriptive touches, such as

   The cuckoo knew its latest day had come,
   And told its name once more to all the hills,