Only to look once more on the land of the memories of childhood, Forgetting weary winds and barren foam:

Only to bid farewell to the combe and the orchard and the moorland, And sleep at last among the fields of home!"

So he was silently praying, till now, when his strength was ebbing faster

The Lizard lay before them faintly blue;

Now on the gleaming horizon the white cliffs laughed along the coast-line,

And now the forelands took the shapes they knew.

There lay the Sound and the Island with green leaves down beside the water,

The town, the Hoe, the masts, with sunset fired

Dreams! ay, dreams of the dead! for the great heart faltered on the threshold,

And darkness took the land his soul desired.

A BALLAD OF JOHN NICHOLSON.

It fell in the year of Mutiny,

At darkest of the night,

John Nicholson by Jalandhar came,

On his way to Delhi fight.

And as he by Jalandhar came

He thought what he must do,

And he sent to the Rajah fair greeting,
To try if he were true.

"God grant your Highness length of days,
And friends when need shall be;

And I pray you send your Captains hither,
That they may speak with me."

On the morrow through Jalandhar town
The Captains rode in state;

They came to the house of John Nicholson
And stood before the gate.

The chief of them was Mehtab Singh,
He was both proud and sly;
His turban gleamed with rubies red,
He held his chin full high.

He marked his fellows how they put
Their shoes from off their feet;
"Now wherefore make ye such ado
These fallen lords to greet?

"They have ruled us for a hundred years,

In truth I know not how,

But though they be fain of mastery,
They dare not claim it now."

Right haughtily before them all
The durbar hall he trod,
With rubies red his turban gleamed,
His feet with pride were shod.

They had not been an hour together,
A scanty hour or so,

When Mehtab Singh rose in his place
And turned about to go.

Then swiftly came John Nicholson
Between the door and him,
With anger smouldering in his eyes
That made the rubies dim.

"You are overhasty, Mehtab Singh,”-
Oh, but his voice was low!

He held his wrath with a curb of iron,
That furrowed cheek and brow.

"You are overhasty, Mehtab Singh,
When that the rest are gone,
I have a word that may not wait
To speak with you alone."

The Captains passed in silence forth
And stood the door behind;

To go before the game was played

Be sure they had no mind.

But there within John Nicholson

Turned him on Mehtab Singh, "So long as the soul is in my body You shall not do this thing.

"Have ye served us for a hundred years
And yet ye know not why?

We brook no doubt of our mastery,
We rule until we die.

"Were I the one last Englishman
Drawing the breath of life,
And you the master-rebel of all
That stir this land to strife-

"Were I," he said, "but a Corporal,
And you a Rajput King,

So long as the soul was in my body
You should not do this thing.

"Take off, take off, those shoes of pride,

Carry them whence they came; Your Captains saw your insolence And they shall see your shame."

When Mehtab Singh came to the door
His shoes they burned his hand,

For there in long and silent lines
He saw the Captains stand.

When Mehtab Singh rode from the gate

His chin was on his breast:

The Captains said, "When the strong command Obedience is best."

STEPHEN PHILLIPS

MR. STEPHEN PHILLIPS blazed suddenly into fame. The conductors of the Academy, realising that there must be contest and emulation-in other words, a sporting interest— in whatever is to fix the attention of the British public, determined to lend a sporting interest to literature by entering our living writers, willy-nilly, in a "selling race" for one hundred sovereigns. The judges to whom they appealed (I know not on what principle selected) pronounced Mr. Phillips's Poems the most remarkable book of the previous year, and he became, for the moment, almost as illustrious as a successful jockey or a "centurycompiling" cricketer.

He was not a beginner in poetry. He had contributed two or three pieces of no particular note to a booklet entitled Primavera, published at Oxford in 1890; the other contributors being Mr. Laurence Binyon, Mr. Arthur S. Cripps, and Mr. Manmohan Ghose. Then, in 1894, he published what is as yet his longest poem, Eremus. As he has not reprinted it, and makes no allusion to it, on the title-page or elsewhere, in his Poems of 1898, one may almost conclude that he wishes it to be forgotten. It is worthy of a better fate; for if it shows something of the poet's weakness, it gives more than a foretaste of his finest strength. Eremus is a blank-verse rhapsody of some 1300 lines, expounding, in the form of a

vision, a fantastically pessimistic philosophy. It is marred by the lack of constructive and dramatic instinct which we shall notice again in Mr. Phillips's later work. The machinery is tedious and absurd. Eremus, taken suddenly ill in a cathedral, begs two friars to carry him up to "yon hills of everlasting snow." They do so; and there he relates to them how the Spirit of the Wind—an angel, not "fallen" it would seem, yet inimical to God-bore him beyond the confines of the universe into the region where Chaos

With sounding, sad waves, everlastingly

Breaks sullen on the walls of builded light;

And where unpardoned, hopeless, homeless things
Wander, no limit to their wandering set.

There, first, he met the shade of a friend of his, one Julian, and held converse with him. Then, after passing through a region infested with feeble eighteenth-century personifications Fears, Dread, Apprehensions, Impulses, Suggestions, Doubt, Despair-he arrives with his guide in the limbo of ruined stars, woefully guttering out in the inane, and realises that the Creator is, not precisely an "Aristophanes on high," but a sort of ruthless dramaturge for ever making worlds and peopling them for his own æsthetic enjoyment, and then leaving them to drift to the ignoble end of burnt-out fireworks. On his return to earth, this discovery so haunts him that he cannot live; wherefore, after due impartment of his extra-mundane experiences to the two irrelevant but patient friars, he dies among the snows, and they, like the King of France, come down the hill again. I confess I can discover no merit of invention in this fable. It would have been hard to devise a less interesting framework for the vision; and the vision itself lacks that clear significance, that provisional plausibility, so to speak, which an artist in narrative would have given it. But the writing throughout is attractive, and there are many