the City of Soul

DELICATE imagination and sense of words are not the only qualities that entitle "The City of the Soul " to peculiar distinction. The writer adds to these a technical judgment no less completely at home with the ballad than with the lyrical or sonnet form. As a criticism of verse, this would be exhaustive praise. But these pieces contain just that element of passion which transforms skilful verse into fine poetry. They are a garden of colour. But the colour is always chosen and alive. The ballad soliloquy, "Perkin Warbeck," is extraordinarily good. Modern balladmongers are apt to imagine that refinement of phrase is incompatible with the requisite effect of spontaneity. "Perkin Warbeck" is fastidious in diction throughout, yet only gains the more in atmosphere. The same is true in a less degree of the other ballads. Among the rest of the poems, two translations from "Les Fleurs du Mal" have an appropriate place. In daintiness of expression, often married to exotic sentiment, the translator himself has no slight affinity with Baudelaire. The beauty he sings of derives charm from its very decay. He finds an actual luxury in regret; his "soul is like a silent nightingale, Devising sorrow in a summer night." Night evokes his most intimate music :-- "I cannot see her face as she passes Through my garden of white and red; But I know she has walked where the daisies and grasses Are curtseying after her tread." This book is full of things which tempt one to linger. The "Wine of Summer," instinct with fancies that float "Like tired moths on heavy velvet wings," and "The Garden of Death," where "never comes the moon To matron fullness, here no child-bearing Vexes desire, and the sun knows no noon," are very characteristic of the writer. Many readers are sure to fancy that they penetrate his anonymity. --The Saturday Review of Politics, Literature, Science and Art, Volume 2 [1900]