NEW BOOKS REVIEWED.

POETRY.

WHEN Sara Wiley Drummond was writing "Dante and Beatrice "* she took the word stars to turn and chime upon in imitation of her protagonist and because he loved the stars (herself, like Keats, loving the moon better) hardly aware how strongly and terribly another word echoed through her pages from the very first line, the great name of death. She died before she could set to them her finishing touches, but not before they were stamped with her image and superscription; and they lie in hand now not only to testify to her steadily maturing powers, but to enable us to spy out for once a poet's method. Here, along with much fair and happy imagery, we find already present the complicated harmonies of the line, and the pregnant epithet and phrase. She purposed, we hear, another half-year's work which should have smoothed the verse and eased the cadence and have simplified the somewhat elliptical and ambiguous constructions which here and there darken the limpid and melodious style. Yet how much better can we spare the polish than we could have spared the poem, and even unfinished as it is, where else shall we find among this year's publications, or the last, or the year's before, such welding of poetry to drama, such lyrical and sustained blank verse, such a passion, chaste and noble, such rich and intimate imagery with power to charge the natural world with human emotion, universal and personal, and touch the reader with the thrice-augmented power of both.

This last characteristic, in the present play, shows most advance on Alcestis" and on 66 Philibert" and may well be illustrated here. She writes of

"Dante and Beatrice." Macmillan Company, 1909.

By Sara King Wiley. New York: The

A splendor of purple hills that touch the sky,
A vastness like the spaces of the sea."

And again with a sweep like the night wind's own:

"Now use me for the trumpet of thy might

Wind of the spirit, blown beneath the stars!"

Rarely has a storm been so fraught with spiritual significance as that in which Dante knocks at Beatrice's door:

"Some one is coming with great need to come,

Or quick desire to follow in wind or flame,

The thunder bellowing after-”

And again, in preparation for the supreme moment of the scene and of the play:

"The storm returns amain

Heavy in purple. A chattering of the leaves
Shakes all the tree-tops and a throbbing light
Quickens and goes. I cannot see your face,
But your slight form blots on the window's glare
With every flash. The perfume of your dress
Stifles me here. Hark to the warring winds

That beat against the darkness, on and on."

Alike to those who had seen her pass and those who had not, the exquisite reticence of the brief biographical notice will be eloquent. An impression of her personality is recorded there; here is a question only of the kind and scope of her talent as it marked her work, and poetry such as that cited, such as that which springs to the light at every page, gives her measure as a poet. That Mrs. Drummond's genius was primarily lyrical let witness, if need be, the delicate and long-drawn loveliness of the girls' song above their broideries that, breathing the violet breath of maidenhood and spring, divinely dallies with the innocence of love; or the beautiful, image-charged melodious rain song. She has left in the few slender volumes that enclose what of her life was least perishable as it was most dear, a complete and lovely record. After the classical episodes of "Daphne," "Endymion," of "Orpheus" and "The Fawn," which belong to her maiden days and culminate in the aria and chorus of Iphigenia, she wrote Alcestis, finishing it in the early months of widowhood. "The Coming of Philibert " marked a deliberate turning to the outer world with its large and multitudinous interests, its various

types and a new feeling for its compelling freshness and loveliness; "Dante and Beatrice" was to have marked, in a sense, a new beginning. The piece, at core lyrical, was a prelude to maturity, with verse richer and graver, with feeling deepened and exalted and a preoccupation with great passions and great deeds that pass beyond the individual lovers to the wider duties that call women now, to the services of a common brotherhood recognized at last. Beatrice says:

"I have lived like a flower blown in the sun,
Yet the wind whispers of the distant waves,
And the stars beckon to mysterious skies:
For I will tell you of my solemn dreams

That hand in hand with God I serve His world."

Radiant and ardent, of unconquerable youth, she of the vivid grace and fragile charm has passed, leaving the world poorer and colder, because a poet, ever wielding the high calling with true and sustained reverence, can build no more the lofty rhyme for earthly ears.

Edith Wharton is a prose-writer par excellence, and while she reaches the lyric pitch* in thought and substance there are moments when, fine craftsman that she is, diction and cadence halt and move in the measure of prose.

"Thou sawst me in the cloud, the wave, the bough,
The clod commoved with April."

The word

commoved "somehow translates us quickly into a realm of prose, as also does the false stress in the second line below:

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Yea, this we wait for, this renews us, this
Incarnates us, pale people of your dreams," etc.

But just because she has so won the mastery of a prose style, she cannot give forth her full feeling about life without offering us poetry, for undoubtedly the substance of her thought dwells often in the realm of poetry.

The dramatic monologue of "Vesalius in Zante," reminiscent in form as it is of the great master of the dramatic monologue,

"Artemis to Actæon." By Edith Wharton. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1909.

is full of subtle psychology, fire and high thought, and its form is justified by such splendid lines as:

And again:

66

'They only, who reconquer day by day The inch of ground they camped on overnight, Have right of foothold on this crowded earth.”

"But I so hugged the fleeting self of me,
So loved the lovely perishable hours,
So kissed myself to death upon their lips,
That on one pyre we perished in the end."

Best of all, Mrs. Wharton succeeds in the sonnet, that form which
by its set laws and narrow compass offers a bridge between prose
composition and poetry, and if one were to ask of whom she had
most diligently studied the art of sonnet-making the answer,
him who made "The House of Life" rises from such lines as:
"I heard her feet in irretrievable flight,"

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The touch of kisses that have missed my brow,"

Most exquisite is the sextet from sonnet VIII:

"But other hearts a long, long road doth span,
From some far region of old works and wars,
And the weary armies of the thoughts of man
Have trampled it and furrowed it with scars,
And sometimes, husht, a sacred caravan
Moves over it alone, beneath the stars."

Mrs. Wharton is of the elect. She is one of those who accomplish whatever they set their hands to and she has innumerable facets to her soul. Having proved that she is among the finest writers of prose America has ever produced, she flashes another facet upon us, and we have a new poet and one we could not spare.

We have already expressed our good opinion of the scholarly work of Mrs. Dargan in these pages on the occasion of the publication of her "Lords and Lovers and Other Dramas." Despite the excellence of the work there, she still lacked the artist's free hand, the full conviction and fire of maturity. The present volume,* we feel sure, is apprentice work. It bears every mark of

"Semiramis and Other Plays." By Olive Tilford Dargan. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1909.

being an earlier effort than "Lords and Lovers." One constantly sees the student's attempt and the girl's conceptions. "The Poet," the last play in the volume, trembles on the historic step from the sublime. Genius is perilously near to madness and Poe notably wavered between the two states. Poe handled by the fiery imagination of young maidenhood, missed the effect of genius to give that of its grotesque companion. Indeed, this play completely misses the mark. "Semiramis " tries to make up for poverty of emotion and inspiration by overloading with action and a huddled design. Armies, enemies, friends, servants, hurry and scamper back and forth across the stage, and doubts, trust and mistrust fairly upset each other as they claim the heroine's mind.

The book shows much haste and carelessness in composition in more ways than one. There are many misprints; speeches put into the mouths of the wrong characters; mistakes in cadence and rhythm.

Here and there one gets a fine or fiery line, but they are all too few. Mrs. Dargan has in her the making of a dramatist, but we make the assertion upon the witness only of her former book.

We have always known Mr. Hewlett was a poet making prose. Had he willed the higher task, he might have been that rarest growth of earth-a poet. The thin blue volume* is in part a reissue of an earlier volume which expired painlessly, the author says a few months after birth. The additions to that small volume, namely, the three long poems "Leto's Child," "The Niobids" and "Latmos" set the seal of true poet on this volume. With the scholar's sense of time, Mr. Hewlett has waited eleven years to publish his poems, knowing doubtless that true worth will always find a market and only transient stuff need catch at

occasion.

Every poet sometime writes his hymn to Intellectual Beauty, and the trilogy of poems on Hymnia gives Mr. Hewlett's pictures of three approaches to the shrine. In the first the legend of Callisto serves to point the sorrows, suffering disintegration of

*"Artemision: Idylls and Songs." By Maurice Hewlett. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1909.