a luckless examiner condemned in his public
capacity to pluck for her Little-go the girl graduate whom he privately
adores. Girton seems to be having an important influence on the
Cambridge school of poetry. We are not surprised. The Graces are the
Graces always, even when they wear spectacles.

Then comes Tuberose and Meadowsweet, by Mr. Mark Andre Raffalovich. This
is really a remarkable little volume, and contains many strange and
beautiful poems. To say of these poems that they are unhealthy and bring
with them the heavy odours of the hothouse is to point out neither their
defect nor their merit, but their quality merely. And though Mr.
Raffalovich is not a wonderful poet, still he is a subtle artist in
poetry. Indeed, in his way he is a boyish master of curious music and of
fantastic rhyme, and can strike on the lute of language so many lovely
chords that it seems a pity he does not know how to pronounce the title
of his book and the theme of his songs. For he insists on making
'tuberose' a trisyllable always, as if it were a potato blossom and not a
flower shaped like a tiny trumpet of ivory. However, for the sake of his
meadowsweet and his spring-green binding this must be forgiven him. And
though he cannot pronounce 'tuberose' aright, at least he can sing of it
exquisitely.

Finally we come to Sturm und Drang, the work of an anonymous writer.
Opening the volume at hazard we come across these graceful lines:

How sweet to spend in this blue bay
The close of life's disastrous day,
To watch the morn break faintly free
Across the greyness of the sea,
What time Memnonian music fills
The shadows of the dewy hills.

Well, here is the touch of a poet, and we pluck up heart and read on. The
book is a curious but not inartistic combination of the mental attitude
of Mr. Matthew Arnold with the style of Lord Tennyson. Sometimes, as in
The Sicilian Hermit, we get merely the metre of Locksley Hall without its
music, merely its fine madness and not its fine magic. Still, elsewhere
there is good work, and Caliban in East London has a great deal of power
in it, though we do not like the adjective 'knockery' even in a poem on
Whitechapel.

On the whole, to those who watch the culture of the age, the most
interesting thing in young poets is not so much what they invent as what
masters they follow. A few years ago it was all Mr. Swinburne. That era
has happily passed away. The mimicry of pas