Baffled and beaten back she works on still,

Weary and sick of soul she works the more, Sustained by her indomitable will:

The hands shall fashion and the brain shall porc,
And all her sorrow shall be turned to labour,
Till Death the friend-foe piercing with his sabre
That mighty heart of hearts ends bitter war.

But as if blacker night could dawn on night,
With tenfold gloom on moonless night unstarred,
A sense more tragic than de eat and blight,
More desperate than strife with hope debarred,
More fatal than the adamantine Never
Encompassing her passionate endeavour,
Dawns glooming in her tenebrous regard:

The sense that every struggle brings defeat
Because Fate holds no prize to crown success;
That all the oracles are dumb or cheat

Because they have no secret to express;

That none can pierce the vast black veil uncerta a
Because there is no light beyond the curtain;
That all is vanity and nothingness.

Titanic from her high throne in the north,
That City's sombre Patroness and Queen,

In bronze sublimity she gazes forth

Over her Capital of teen and threne, Over the river with its isles and bridges,

The marsh and moorland, to the stern rock-ridges,
Confronting them with a coeval mien.

The moving moon and stars from east to west
Circle before her in the sea of air;

Shadows and gleams glide round her solemn rest.
Her subjects often gaze up to her there:

The strong to drink new strength of iron endurance,
The weak new terrors; all, renewed assurance
And confirmation of the old despair.

ARTHUR O'SHAUGHNESSY.

[ARTHUR WILLIAM EDGAR O'SHAUGHNESSY was born on the 14th of March, 1844. He was an ichthyologist by profession, and his entire life, from boyhood to the day of his death, was passed in the service of the British Museum. He died, after a very short illness, from the effects of a neglected cold, on the 30th of January, 1881. He published during his time three volumes of verse, An Epic of Women, 1870; Lays of France, 1872; Music and Moonlight, 1874. His posthumous volume, Songs of a Worker, appeared in 1881.]

The same month that saw O'Shaughnessy's death deprived English literature of one of its most vigorous representatives, a woman who had no less ambition than he had to excel in verse. In the chorus of praise and regret which followed George Eliot to the grave, O'Shaughnessy passed away almost unperceived. As far as intellect is concerned he had no claim to be mentioned near her. But in poetry the battle is not always to the strong, and he seems to have possessed, what we all confess that she lacked, the indescribable quality which gives the smallest warbler admission to that forked hill from which Bacon and Hobbes are excluded. In O'Shaughnessy this quality was thin, and soon exhausted. His earliest book had most of it; his posthumous book, which ought never to have been published, had none of it. It was volatile, and evaporated with the passage of youth. But when his work has been thoroughly sifted, there will be found to remain a small residuum of exquisite poetry, full of odour and melody, all in one key, and essentially unlike the verse of anyone else. I have ventured to indicate as the central feature of this poetry its habit of etherealising human feeling, and of looking upon mundane emotion as the broken echo of a subtle and supernatural passion. This is what seems to make O'Shaughnessy's best pieces, such as The Fountain of Tears, Barcarolle, There is an Earthly Glimmer in the Tomb, Song of Betrothal, Outcry, and even, as the reverse of the medal, the were-wolf ballad of Bisclaveret, so delicate and unique. We have nothing else quite like them in English; the Germans had a kindred product in the songs of Novalis. EDMUND W. GOSSE

FROM BISCLAVERET.'

[Epic of Women.]

Now over intervening waste

Of lowland drear, and barren wold, I scour, and ne'er assuage my haste, Inflamed with yearnings manifold ;

Drinking a distant sound that seems
To come around me like a flood;
While all the track of moonlight gleams
Before me like a streak of blood;

And bitter stifling scents are past
A-dying on the night behind,
And sudden piercing stings are cast
Against me in the tainted wind.

And lo, afar, the gradual stir,

And rising of the stray wild leaves;

The swaying pine, and shivering fir,

And windy sound that moans and heaves

In first fits, till with utter throes
The whole wild forest lolls about;
And all the fiercer clamour grows,
And all the moan becomes a shout;

And mountains near and mountains far
Breathe freely; and the mingled roar
Is as of floods beneath some star

Of storms, when shore cries unto shore.

But soon, from every hidden lair
Beyond the forest tracks, in thick

Wild coverts, or in deserts bare,

Behold they come, -renewed and quick

The splendid fearful herds that stray
By midnight, when tempestuous moons
Light them to many a shadowy prey,
And earth beneath the thunder swoons.

SONG.

[From Lays of France.]

Has summer come without the rose,
Or left the bird behind?

Is the blue changed above thee,

O world? or am I blind?

Will you change every flower that grows,
Or only change this spot-
Where she who said, I love thee,
Now says, I love thee not?

The skies seemed true above thee;

The rose true on the tree;

The bird seemed true the summer through; But all proved false to me:

World, is there one good thing in you

Life, love, or death-or what?

Since lips that sang I love thee
Have said, I love thee not?

I think the sun's kiss will scarce fall
Into one flower's gold cup;

I think the bird will miss me,
And give the summer up:
sweet place, desolate in tall
Wild grass, have you forgot
How her lips loved to kiss me,
Now that they kiss me not?

Be false or fair above me;
Come back with any face,
Summer! do I care what you do?

You cannot change one place

The grass, the leaves, the earth, the dew,—

The grave I make the spot,

Here where she used to love me,
Here where she loves me not.

SONG.

[From Music and Moonlight.]

I made another garden, yea,
For my new love ;

I left the dead rose where it lay,
And set the new above.

Why did the summer not begin?
Why did my heart not haste?
My old love came and walked therein,
And laid the garden waste.

She entered with her weary smile,
Just as of old;

She looked around a little while,
And shivered at the cold.

Her passing touch was death to all,
Her passing look a blight;
She made the white rose petals fall,
And turned the red rose white.

Her pale robe, clinging to the grass

Seemed like a snake

That bit the grass and ground, alas!
And a sad trail did make.

She went up slowly to the gate;
And then, just as of yore,

She turned back at the last to wait,
And say frewell once more.