To have loved, to have been beloved by you above

All other loving women, made for love.

No woman ever loved me as you loved,

And now that you have from my brows removed
The heavy crown of love, and cast it down,
I cannot stoop to wear a lighter crown.
Having been crowned by you, I abdicate
Kingship, and join the beggars at your gate.

I cannot work: I dare not sit alone.
There's not a corner here that has not known
Some moment of you, and your pictured eyes
Pursue me with relentless memories.

Here was the chair you sat in; here we lay
Until your face grew fainter with the day,
And, in a veil of kisses, swooning white,

Fell back into the mystery of night.

'Twas here I kissed you first; 'twas there you said,

"I love you," and "Would God that I were dead!" And now, when you are gone for evermore,

I pace between the window and the door,

And, in the feverish folly of despair,

Stand listening for your step upon the stair.

JOHN B. TABB

IN Mr. John B. Tabb we come upon a clear-cut, cameolike poetic individuality. His poetry, so far as it is known to me, is contained in two exceedingly dainty little volumes entitled Poems (1894) and Lyrics (1897). These booklets exactly typify Mr. Tabb's dainty talent. It is in no disparaging sense that I use this phrase. Smallness of scale is the deliberately-adopted characteristic of all Mr. Tabb's work. His lyrics seldom extend beyond three quatrains, and are often compressed into one. In the booklet entitled Poems, for instance, out of 163 numbers, only three overrun a single page, while the great majority fill less than half of one of the diminutive pages. In truth, Mr. Tabb is an epigrammatist rather than a pure lyrist. Even when he writes what is to the eye a song, it is apt to be to the ear and the mind an expanded epigram. His metres are correct and graceful, but they have no lyric impetus-they do not sing. His exquisite measured speech neither makes its own music nor asks to be upborne on the wings of melody.

The main sources of his inspiration are three: Nature (and in especial birds and flowers); Devotional sentiment, sincere though fanciful; Personal sentiment, which finds discreet, unimpassioned, one might almost say attenuated, utterance. If one were asked to illustrate the somewhat overworked distinction between fancy and imagination, one

need but open at random either of Mr. Tabb's booklets, to find a clear, and very often a striking, example of the former quality. He has none of the harshness, the violences, of the spiritual singers of the seventeenth century; in his limpidity of form, indeed, he is much more reminiscent of the epicurean Herrick; but in his application of a humourless wit to spiritual subjects he denotes himself a true descendant of Crashaw and Herbert. I do not employ the word "humourless" in a reproachful sense, as meaning that he says things whereof humour would have checked the utterance. This is seldom or never the case. My meaning is simply to release the term wit from its conventional but inessential association with merriment, before applying it to the master faculty of Mr. Tabb's sedate and pensive mind. The essence of wit is a quick perception of analogies; but all analogies are not necessarily comic. On the other hand, when we find a poem unmistakably inspired by a purely intellectual concept, we are apt to doubt, not the sincerity or depth, but the immediate poignancy, of the emotion it expresses. That is why I call Mr. Tabb's utterances of personal sentiment attenuated. Perhaps sublimated would be a better word.

So much I say by way of delimitation-not certainly of disparagement. Mr. Tabb is a most admirable writer: he has said numberless beautiful things, with an accent all his own. He does not always avoid those pitfalls of the concettist, frigidity and triviality; but even his frigidity is often exquisite. Here are two conceits which are wintry in every sense; but who can deny their beauty?—

TO THE BABE NIVA.

Niva, Child of Innocence,

Dust to dust we go:

Thou, when Winter wooed thee hence,

Wentest snow to snow.