The Bookfellow.

Auckland Star, Volume XLI, Issue 16, 16 July 1910, Page 11

The Bookfellow.

[Copyright. —All Rights Reserved.]

(Written for the " Auckland Star" by A. G. Stephens.) When I was a child I used to fear the stars, Those ancient presences so white and cold, But now, to-night, they seem thro' cloudy bars Pleadingly looking on our dusky fold. In all their pilgrimage, their starry strife, They have seen nothing fairer, more divine, Than this low hearth, where burns the spark of life. This flower-strewn .barrow where we fret and pine: Here, where the trembling note of mother bird, And broken words of human love are heard. And all our knowledge comes to this: Some day A messenger will touch us from the deep. And, softer than a mother's voice, will say. "It Is not morning yet. Sleep, gently sleep." ANNIE WILSON. ,-N.Z. [VERSE WRITERS: REVISIONS. V.—MRS. J. G. WILSON. Miss Annie Adams, a Victorian girl, was reft from home and Australia by James Glenny Wilson, in 1874, when she was 26 years old, and sb.e has dwelt in New Zealand ever since; does not residence in New Zealand for the greater part of her life make her a New Zealander? Admit, at least, that New Zealand can claim an equal share in her verses, so many of them lived in New Zealand, shaped by New Zealand scenery, breathing New Zealand a'spiratibns. She has even cast a poetical halo upon the unromantie name of Bulls, still her township of residence in her cheerful age of 62.

Does every reader know that Bulls is 41 miles south of Wanganui? that the Rangitikei River is the river of Bulls, that it hae rich, level soil, and a population of 000 or so? that it was "named after Mr. James Bull, who started a etore and inn here in 1859"? Bull's, with an apostrophe, the Government and some old residents will spell it still, honouring the progenitor.

Like Mary Poott and Ada Cambridge, Annie Adams commenced literature with "The Australasian" in the day of Editor Henry Gullett, a landmark of Australian journalism still to be seen in the neighbourhood of Sydney. Rhymes she wrote, and a little prose (ehe has since published two novels); her literary bent was manifest. Then in ISS9 came the London collection of verses, "Themes i-nd Variations," ais in 1901 "A Book of

Verses"—reprinting most of the "Themes," adding a few new pieces. Unlike some of our married authors, who cling to their maiden names, and yield the husband only parenthetic rank, this authoress has always been "Mrs. James Glenny Wilson." Her verees have won the immortality of the school-books, both in New Zealand and in Australia; a hundred thousand children have grown up reciting "Fairyland"; nay, there may be naif a million, and there will be many more. This is a poet's guerdon! And all the anthologists have helped themselves; and "I have always found editors a kindly and encouraging race," says Mrs. Wilson, thus kindly encouraging the editors, who are (some of them) not always freo from conscientious doubts about their' true duty to poetical contributors. W. D. Howells, too (a name not without credit), -was stimulated to write in "Harper's Magazine" that "Mrs. Wilson does not write so well at all timee as she does now and then. She is sometimes so good that one wonders why she ehould not always be very good. She varies not only from poem to poem, but from verse to verse, as if the feeling came from a genuine but inadequate impulse of feeling, of fancy." An English review remarked that some of the pieces were "almost in the first class." "Oh, that almost!" sighs Mrs. Wilson; "can we never remove it from our path?" May we capture a fanciful explanation from heredity? Mrs. Wilson's father came from the North of Ireland; her mother was Scotch. Which parent is it that sees the bright gleam of poesy? Which parent trice to grasp the gleam so closely that it escapes from the hand 1 For Mrs. Wilson is rarely content to leave the rosy goddess a fragment of her enveloping cloud. She lias no mystic atmosphere, and would set down all with clarity, even that which cannot be set down. So some of her descriptive lines are among the finest that have been used in these countries to describe things visible—-the appearance of skiee and woods and waters, the garment of Nature; and with the description often comes the emotion that the witness has felt, the thought that has risen m her rapt mind as she gazed. Then, in the elaboration and search for words to say all, all, that has been seen, the magic may flee; and W. D. Howells is set wondering. Mrs. Wilson does not sing. Her verse is not in the mode that ive praise most to-day, with a fierce throb and a thrilling cry; her meditation, follows closely on the heels of vision; familiar with books, she recollects her emotion in too much tranquillity. (In the last "Monthly Review," Swinburne is found rising- from the dust to accuse Matthew Arnold of "perversity of cultivated impertinence and audacity of self-erratic conceit"; and there is no li-ann in saying that Arnold's hint of a definition of

■poetry is far too calm for genius, however it may be for culture.) It is in "Themes and Variations," the book of her youth, that Mrs. Wilson is best seen; and as a poetical breviary there is no New Zealand book to be ranked higher. ("A Book of Verses" does not reprint all that is good in the earlier book, and its additions are not important.) But "Themes and Variations" must not only be read; it must be read again and again and again, before it will yield all its virtue. Much of Mrs. Wilson's is dormant poetry—not quite articulate—living not in the words, but just under them. Its beauty as a verse of externals, flung from a full pulse, vividly, is often evident; its sentimental merit is evident, too (Mrs. Wilson doee not rise or fall to passion); yet it is in the content of poetical suggestions that Mrs. Wilson«has not always ■been able to utter that its chief value resides. So her charm grows upon the attentive reader, and much of it escapes the reader at haphazard. In verbal melody Mrs. Wilson fails often; she writes for eye and mind, and scarcely at all for the ear. Yefc it may be that more fine lines and apt epithets could be culled from her work than from that of any other New Zealand writer; ehe has the gift of vision, and tlie words to make her vision bright. Fancy, too, that is not an airy imagination, but playa thoughtfully or sportively round its object; and a considerable skill in turning observation to spiritual account. Altogether, one thinks that a, few persons in every New Zealand generation will discover "Themes and Variations" with a new surprise, and will linger all their lives on the discovery. Mrs. Wilson is not an author for quotation; her mefit is in the grain and texture of her work. Having agreed that she does not yield a strong rapture, we may be content to find upon nearly every page a passage full of tine pleasure—"a little garden blossom-starred." Through this aim window we loot out of doors On purple hills and plains and ever happy shores. And then, for New Zealanders, there is the continual intimacy with the beauty of New Zealand, perfectly depicted: — Know'st thou an island on the misty ocean, Green, green with fern, and many an ancient tree. Whose waving tops, with soft perpetual Repeat the same primeval melody? The rata with the red pine interlaces, And lights tie forest with a scarlet glen in. The sunshine on the hills the shadow chases; The fern-tree bends in silence o'er the stream. If Mrs. Wilson is not mistress of the dominion of dreams, she has a rare power over realities. And the fire, our boon -.companion, Laughs and dances in tb,e gloom.

; is an excellent image of a thing that many writers have described less precisely. The lines that follow are no less vivid:— ■While the roof-tree creaks and quivers, With the wild autumnal sale. And the staggering forest echoes To the breakers' distant wail"The staggering forest" is truth itself. The same keen sight is applied to mental states, as in this of the sailor's mother preparing a welcome for her home-coming son: — Go, seek in the oak-chest The blue-flowered plate, The bowl like an eggshell, The cup's silver mate. Lay on the round table The damask so fine. And cut the black cluster Still left on the vine. My hand shakes, — '■ but bring mc That pure honeycomb, Now nothing shall vex mc, My boy Jias come home! Or take these lines for Schubert: — Such music moves upon the verge of day, The sorrow that will never be consoled, The dream that may not be interpreted, The tongue we understand but cannot speak. Mts. Wileon never writes for writing's sake; and with one line, as "The quail starts from her hidden nest," she will reach the final expression of a thing seen. "Palm trees that sing like the sails of a ship," "Breakers that fling out their white wings of spray," and similar lines, exhibit a very rare faculty. This absolute precision of epithets will sometimes carry a poetical burthen, as of— The murmuring ocean, sorrow-stirred, That even sobs in its sleep. or an allusion like— "Our Danae tree that blooms in rain and sold. applied to the Australian wattle, on an evening— When rosy footprints of the flying cloud, Still sparkle from the shallow forest-pool. Mrs. Wilson's sheer lucidity would be more prized in French verse than in English; a French poet of to-day would be proud to have written of— Those green and moss-grown alleys of the past, Where sinUs the etill light thro' the silent glade, And statues wait half-blinded by the leaves, Listening for footfalls that will never come. The last two lines (and Mrs. Wilson gives us other similar glimpses) make us waver in our fidelity to the lyric of emotion. Vision at such a height, expressed in such a form, is surely destined to perpetual remembrance. We have spoken of -flaws in Mis. Wilson's verse, and flaws there are—in any as-

pect; desert spaces, phrases of ill-wed eound and sense; but her final veracity of form, her occasional adequacy of idea, must also be insisted upon. And Baly Is tnere, and Atlantis the fair, And the proud towered city of Ireland. is a keynote of New Zealand mastery in one mode, the mode of instinctive poetry. Match ffc -with, this keynote of art:— And statues wait, half-blinded by the leaves, Listening for f ootf alls that will' never come.