oments. Her eye for Nature is
peculiarly keen. She has always an exquisite sense of colour and
sometimes a most delicate ear for music. Many of her poems, such as The
Moat House, Absolution, and The Singing of the Magnificat are true works
of art, and Vies Manquees is a little gem of song, with its dainty
dancing measure, its delicate and wilful fancy and the sharp poignant
note of passion that suddenly strikes across it, marring its light
laughter and lending its beauty a terrible and tragic meaning.

From the sonnets we take this at random:

Not Spring--too lavish of her bud and leaf--
But Autumn with sad eyes and brows austere,
When fields are bare, and woods are brown and sere,
And leaden skies weep their enchantless grief.
Spring is so much too bright, since Spring is brief,
And in our hearts is Autumn all the year,
Least sad when the wide pastures are most drear
And fields grieve most--robbed of the last gold sheaf.

These too, the opening stanzas of The Last Envoy, are charming:

The Wind, that through the silent woodland blows
O'er rippling corn and dreaming pastures goes
Straight to the garden where the heart of Spring
Faints in the heart of Summer's earliest rose.

Dimpling the meadow's grassy green and grey,
By furze that yellows all the common way,
Gathering the gladness of the common broom,
And too persistent fragrance of the may--

Gathering whatever is of sweet and dear,
The wandering wind has passed away from here,
Has passed to where within your garden waits
The concentrated sweetness of the year.

But Miss Nesbit is not to be judged by mere extracts. Her work is too
rich and too full for that.

Mr. Foster is an American poet who has read Hawthorne, which is wise of
him, and imitated Longfellow, which is not quite so commendable. His
Rebecca the Witch is a story of old Salem, written in the metre of
Hiawatha, with a few rhymes thrown in, and conceived in the spirit of the
author of The Scarlet Letter. The combination is not very satisfactory,
but the poem, as a piece of fiction, has many elements of interest. Mr.
Foster seems to be quite popular in America. The Chicago Times finds his
fancies 'very playful and sunny,' and the Indianapolis Journal speaks of
his 'tender and appreciative style.' He is certainly a clever
story-teller, and The Noah's Ark (which 'somehow had escaped the
sheriff's hand') is b