TIME'S MONOTONE.

Autumn and Winter,
Summer and Spring-

Hath Time no other song to sing ?
Weary we grow of the changeless tune-
June-December,

December-June!

Time, like a bird, hath but one song,

One way to build, like a bird hath he; Thus hath he built so long, so long, Thus hath he sung-Ah me!

Time, like a spider, knows, be sure,

One only wile, though he seems so wise:
Death is his web, and Love his lure,
And you and I his flies.

"Love!" he sings

In the morning clear,

"Love! Love! Love!"

And you never hear

How, under his breath,

He whispers, "Death!

Death! Death!"

Yet Time-'tis the strangest thing of all— Knoweth not the sense of the words he saith; Eternity taught him his parrot-call

Of"Love and Death."

Year after year doth the old man climb
The mountainous knees of Eternity,
But Eternity telleth nothing to Time-
It may not be.

ON MR. GLADSTONE'S RETIREMENT.

The world grows Lilliput, the great men go;
If greatness be, it wears no outer sign;
No more the signet of the mighty line
Stamps the great brow for all the world to know.
Shrunken the mould of manhood is, and lo!

Fragments and fractions of the old divine,
Men pert of brain, planned on a mean design,
Dapper and undistinguished-such we grow.

No more the leonine heroic head,

The ruling arm, great heart, and kingly eye;

No more th' alchemic tongue that turned poor themes

Of statecraft into golden-glowing dreams;

No more a man for man to deify:

Laurel no more-the heroic age is dead.

MRS. MEYNELL

In

STERN veracity, I fear, enforces the admission that few poetesses of the past have shown a very highly developed faculty for strict poetical form. I am not aware that the works of any woman in any modern language are reckoned among the consummate models of metrical style. England, at any rate, we have had no female Milton, Coleridge, or Swinburne. Great poetesses though they were, beyond a doubt, Mrs. Browning and Miss Rossetti were incurious of formal perfection, especially in rhyme; and ladies as a rule seem to have aimed at a certain careless grace rather than a strenuous complexity or accuracy of metrical structure.

In respect of accuracy, though not of complexity, Mrs. Meynell is one of the rare exceptions to this rule. Within a carefully limited range, her form is unimpeachable. Her grace is often exquisite, but never careless. She never strays beyond two or three simple iambic or trochaic measures, and her most elaborate stanza (the sonnet excepted) is one of five lines, with rhyme-scheme either a abba or a baba. Dactylic and anapæstic rhythms and intricate rhyme-patterns she altogether eschews. The sonnet in its strictest form she writes with real accomplishment; but the sonnet is really a very easy mould to fill. rather a commonplace than a paradox.

This, I think, is Who is there, in