The short lyric poem, “To Fausta” has a Shelleian spirit and grace in it. & “The Hayswater Boat” seems a little got up, and is scarcely positive enough.  This remark applies also, and in a stonger degree, to the “Stanzas on a Gipsy Child,” which, and the “Modern Sappho,” previously mentioned, are the pieces least to our taste in the volume.  There is a something about them of drawing-room sentimentality; and they might almost, without losing much save in size, be compressed into poems of the class commonly set to music.  It is rather the basis of thought than the writing of the “Gipsy Child,” which affords cause for objection; nevertheless, there is a passage in which a comparison is started between this child and a “Seraph in an alien planet born,”—­an idea not new, and never, as we think, worth much; for it might require some subtlety to show how a planet capable of producing a Seraph should be alien from that Seraph.

We may here notice a few cases of looseness, either of thought or of expression, to be met with in these pages; a point of style to be particularly looked to when the occurrence or the absence of such forms one very sensible difference between the first-rate and the second-rate poets of the present times.

Thus, in the sonnet “Shakspear,” the conclusion says,

  “All pains the immortal spirit must endure,
  All weakness that impairs, all griefs that bow,
  Find their sole voice in that victorious brow;”

whereas a brow’s voice remains to be uttered:  nor, till the nature of the victory gained by the brow shall have been pointed out, are we able to hazard an opinion of the precise value of the epithet.

In the address to George Cruikshank, we find:  “Artist, whose hand with horror winged;” where a similar question arises; and, returning to the “Gipsy Child,” we are struck with the unmeaningness of the line:  “Who massed round that slight brow these clouds of doom?”

Nor does the following, from the first of the sonnets, “To a Republican Friend,” appear reconcileable with any ideas of appropriateness: 

      ——­“While before me flow
  The armies of the homeless and unfed.”

It is but right to state that the only instance of the kind we remember throughout the volume have now been mentioned.

To conclude.  Our extracts will enable the reader to judge of this Poet’s style:  it is clear and comprehensive, and eschews flowery adornment.  No particular model has been followed, though that general influence which Tennyson exercises over so many writers of this generation may be traced here as elsewhere.  It may be said that the author has little, if anything, to unlearn.  Care and consistent arrangement, and the necessary subordination of the parts to the whole, are evident throughout; the reflective, which appears the more essential form of his thought, does not absorb the due observation or presentment of the outward facts of nature; and a well-poised and serious mind shows itself in every page.