But though such incongruities may jar The sense of fitness in a mind fastidious, Modernity has wholly failed to mar The face of Nature here, or make it hideous.
Inland the amphitheatre of hills Sweeps round with Snowdon as their central crest, And murmurs of innumerable rills Blend with the heaving of the ocean's breast.
Already Autumn's fiery finger laid On heath and marsh and woodland far and wide In all their gorgeous pageantry has arrayed The tranquil beauties of the countryside.
Here every prospect pleases, and the spot, Unspoilt, unvulgarised by man, remains, Thanks largely to a System which has not Accelerated or improved its trains.
Yet even here, amid untroubled ways, Far from the city's fevered, tainted breath, Yon distant plume of yellow smoke betrays The ceaseless labours of the mills of death.
"William Arthur Fletcher, ship's apprentice, of South Shields, was remanded for a week on a charge of being absent from his ship. His captain alleged that he had found Fletcher asleep on the bridge."--_Daily Dispatch_.
It must have been his mind that was absent.
"At St. Peter's, Vere Street, where he is going to preach from the 30th of this month to the end of this year, the Rev. R.J. Campbell will speak from the pulpit of Frederick Denison Maurice, like himself a convert to the Church of England ... To hear him was an experience never forgotten."--_Guardian_.
And this although MAURICE rarely preached for more than one month on end.
(_By Mr. Punch's Staff of Learned Clerks_.)
I can't help thinking that _Gyp_, the central figure in Mr. JOHN GALSWORTHY'S new story, _Beyond_ (HEINEMANN), was unhappy in her encounters with the opposite sex. But if memory serves me this is an experience familiar to Mr. GALSWORTHY'S heroines. Men were always wanting to kiss _Gyp_, or to marry her, or both, and after a time kept going off and repeating the process with somebody else; so that one can't fairly be astonished if towards the end of the book her outlook had become rather cynical. The character who might have preserved her estimate of mankind in general, and the best and most sympathetically drawn figure in the book, is _Gyp's_ perfectly delightful old father, who throughout the conspicuous failure of her two unions, legitimate and other, retained his fine and chivalrous regard and unfailing care for a daughter who might well have been a thorn in the flesh of a conventional parent. But the relations of these two were never conventional. _Gyp_ had been herself a love-child, and the knowledge of this is shown very clearly in its influence upon their mutual attitude. As for her own affairs, these were, first--to her father's unbounded astonishment--marriage with a temperamental violinist, who ran rapidly down the scale from adoration of his own wife to intrigue with another's; second, clandestine relations with a man of her own race and breed, who loved her to idolatry, and within a few months was found embracing his cousin. Poor _Gyp_! I jest; but you will need no telling that for sincerity and beauty of writing here is a book that you cannot afford to miss. Sometimes I am a little uncertain what Mr. GALSWORTHY is driving at, but I never fail to admire his drive.