ow shall the he-goat, black Adultery,
With the roused ram, Retaliation, twine
Their horns in one to butt at Filippo."

"As the salamander, cast in fire,
Exudes preserving mucus, so my mind,
Cased in thick satisfaction of success,
Shall be uninjured."

The work, nevertheless, appears to have had some share in improving its
author's fortunes. From that time, he has received at least a partial
recognition in Canada. Soon after its publication, he succeeded in
procuring employment on the daily newspaper press of Montreal, which
enabled him to give up his uncongenial labor at the work-bench. The
Montreal Literary Club elected him one of its Fellows, and the
short-lived literary periodicals of the Province no longer ignored his
existence. In spite of a change of circumstances which must have given
him greater leisure as well as better opportunities of culture, he has
published but two poems in the last five years,--an Ode for the
ter-centenary anniversary of Shakspeare's birth, and the sacred idyl of
"Jephthah's Daughter." The former is a production the spirit of which is
worthy of its occasion, although, in execution, it is weakened, by an
overplus of imagery and epithet. It contains between seven and eight
hundred lines. The grand, ever-changing music of the Ode will not bear
to be prolonged beyond a certain point, as all the great Masters of Song
have discovered: the ear must not be allowed to become _quite_
accustomed to the surprises of the varying rhythm, before the closing
Alexandrine.

"Jephthah's Daughter" contains between thirteen and fourteen hundred
lines. In careful finish, in sustained sweetness and grace, and solemn
dignity of language, it is a marked advance upon any of the author's
previous works. We notice, indeed, the same technical faults as in
"Saul," but they occur less frequently, and may be altogether corrected
in a later revision of the poem. Here, also, the Scriptural narrative is
rigidly followed, and every temptation to adorn its rare simplicity
resisted. Even that lament of the Hebrew girl, behind which there seems
to lurk a romance, and which is so exquisitely paraphrased by Tennyson,
in his "Dream of Fair Women,"--

"And I went, mourning: 'No fair Hebrew boy
Shall smile away my maiden blame among
The Hebrew mothers,'"--

is barely mentioned in the words of the text. The passion of Jephthah,
the horror, the piteous pleading of his wife and daugh