--Mr. Tennyson's new dramatic poem is before us in the elegant Boston typography of Ticknor & Field's worthy successors.[31] The poet laureate added little to his fame by his previous dramatic work, "Queen Mary"; he will gain less by this. It is good of course to a certain degree, but it is only "fair to middling" Tennysonian work. We find in it not a passage that stirs us, not one that charms. It puts the story of the Norman Conquest of England into a dramatic form and into good blank verse, with sound and sensible treatment of the subject, and that is all. Its author's good taste, and above all his experience, his dexterity, acquired by such long practice, are manifest on every page; but there is little more. He dedicates it to the present Lord Lytton, in evident desire to wipe out the memory of the old feud between him and Bulwer Lytton; but that was too black and too bitter to be sponged away with a little sugar and water.
--Mr. Latham Cornell Strong is modest in his preface about his collection of verse,[32] although he is rather too elaborately metaphorical in his way of blushing properly. He says, as to the flaws in his poems, that he "has a reasonable confidence that they will not all be discovered by any one reader." This may be true from the probable fact that no one reader will read them all; we think that we have met with enough of them to show that Mr. Strong might well have refrained himself from publication. For example, we think that a true poet could hardly have written many such passages as these, and there are many such in the volume:
The night is rising from the trees, Her _hands_, uplifted, _trail_ with stars
The moon hath flung _its banners_ on the sward
Old Rupert named, _alone of all the rest_ She most esteemed, for he had brought her flowers, To wreathe her tresses and make manifest His sympathy for her, _in many ways expressed_
The last four lines unite incorrectness, tameness, and inelegance with remarkable and fatal facility.
[12] "_The Theistic Conception of the World._ An Essay in Opposition to Certain Tendencies of Modern Thought." By B. F. COCKER, D.D., LL.D. New York: Harper & Brothers.
[13] "_Religion and the State_; or, The Bible and the Public Schools." By SAMUEL T. SPEAR, D.D. 12mo, pp. 393. New York: Dodd, Mead & Co.