BOOKS AND AUTHORS.

Dominion, Volume 1, Issue 253, 18 July 1908, Page 12

BOOKS AND AUTHORS.

VERSES OLD AND NEW.

, THE SHADOW. Beside the hidden gate of death' The children play and sing; , , - Their 6weet, unseeing.eyes are glad, .< . i ,- Their shrill young voices ring. • ' Only some listening mother hears • - Tne whisper of Deaths wing. v . Along the sudden edge of life ■, The children run and race; 1 They care not, in their eager game ■ How perilous the'place, Only some watching mother, seea . .i'rSe shadow of Death's.face. .Within the : tender house, of love, Earlv still and late, Tho children laugh, ■ nor; ever reok - , Of who /without may wait. < Only somei peeping mother knows . Death's hand upon the gate. ; Suddenly the best-beloved Ceases from his play. Gives no look-behind, but treads Down the shadowed way. ' •'On aoross his mother's heart , His foet. to silence Btray. . —8.C., in. the "Westminster Gazette. A GARDEN BUD. ' (For a; Babe's Birthday.) Now while the grey skies harden, ' And send'their white-haired-warden ■ To guard chill-hearted earth, . . A buf in love's own garden ) ~ ' Glows' ringed with greenish girth. It blooms, and sullen winter Flies forth to shake and splinter • ,llich cloudy mountain towers; For here nought dark may enter . Where Love illumes the bowers. ■Tea, Love whose . hand !djscloses , ■ ,The fairest -of air roses ' ', That Hope raigfit deem to be Dropt down from where reposes,. In heaven; ono sacred tree. . . It smiles, and 10l the glory , ••. . i . ■ Of sundawn transitory . .Breaks radiant in bloom— -A rainbow rings the hoary, Dark, sunless gulfs of gloom. . We listen—lovelier iaughteWV;; .' • That 'neath the forest*-rafter ; : TJpripples from whito streams, Breaks o'or us, and thereafter ■ Heaven colours all'our dreams. .» . " .Let • others, seek'. their ■ heaven, The brotherhood,- 1 sin-shriven, t , By loveless ways and lono, : , Without' the light, God-given, • ■ -.' Of. blossoms earthward. blown. But, we find heaven nearer ■ In ohildron, lovelier dearer, Than aught of heaven wo orave, . :iWhose radiant^joy rings clearer " ! . Than all the sea's loud wave. : ■ —J, B. O'Hara, in the "Australasian." A DEVON SONG. last dimpsy light I had gude speed— . ■ Sing' hey, sing ho, sing honey— ,' . ■ • For tie loveliest woman ever you seed . .Went down-along over the wator-mead— Sing hey, sing honey hoi ... •''Your pathway shall bo mine," quoth I— Sing hey, sing ho, sing;honey— "you're the loveliest creature under the sky, And for you I'll live, and for you I'd die!" Sing.hey, sipg honey liql . . . ''Gude Lord! wheer was you born?" cried she— Sing hey, 6ing ho, sing honey— y f I'm ' the farmer's wife an' a mother o' three! ■. ... My eldest be comin' to welcome me." Sing hey, sing honey ho! . . . —Eden Phillpotts, in tho June "Pall Mall' . .. - Magazine." ' PE QUINCEY THE DEFAULTER. A fragile little old gentleman, pathetically helpless in affairs of the world, but. possessed of a' gentle,; scholarly dignity : and; a .inost lovable kindliness of manner; an old man with the, face of a poet, pale, high-broived, ascetio,; and oyes of a oiirious, deep brilliancy that was sometimes shadowed by pain. Such in his later ; days iwas Thomas' do Quincey; . suoh'. was'• the. roan. for', whom -, rent-hujigry.' landladies searohed Edinburgh in the 'forties. One must be added to the picture, onething which perhaps his lady pursuers, had . never seen—though it may bo that they had soen-.- it and : pursued him ilia less bitterly therefor. Over every expression of the face hung' imminent a saddening ,presence, the, presence 1 of a great tragedy. • It was not 1 tragedy written iff characters of line and furrow; it was something infinitely more; subtle, a reflection from the mind,, of a lasting pain' which; had become there; the background of all thought. ;' It fell upon the faco as a shadow, tho darker because it fell where'thore seemed no place-for shadows: The quaint little sexagenarian gentleman at whom everyone had laughed and to-.whoin everyone/felt' goodwill, what part had he with the dark things of .the world? None, to all seeming. ■ And .yet the, figures that are' most rich in; tho. comedies 'of life are' often most darkly, touched with its tragedies.;: So. at least it was with De Quincey. : ;' The exalted hours which his awful familiar- could stiir bring him were purchased days of misery, of black, unmeaning, measureless despiir, but the'melancholy was moro than physical. One thought dominated his mind . with an abiding tyranny of pain. He looked on his life and saw in it a great failure. He knew-that his name stood upon the eternal records for a great debt unpaid, for "oiio task moro declined, one more footpath liritrod." This was not knowledge of tho surface. Indeed, it was the first concern of his superficial consciousness to persuade himself to persuade others that at the great crossroads of his ]ifo, he" had taken the right way: In tho depths of his soul ho know that ho had not. The theme of his "Confessions" is a bravely wen freedom from a cruel enthralmont, but as ho tells the story the inexorable completeness of that enthralment and the fair hopes which its grasp crushed out' become himself and to those who read the book ever, moro terribly apparent. And indeod the hopes were fair.- Few men in a lifetime have attained to such pow,ers as camd 1 with De Quincey into tho world, Scholar he was, thinker he might havo beeii, and from his earliost days-lis mind was the mind of a poet—a mind open to every .. influence of beauty, flooded with tlio wonderful light of a rare imagination, at once responsive to the lightest breath of , emotion v' and capable of tompestuous passions of love and grief which are spared to smaller men. But tho consummation of his varied genius, in so far as it. was consummated at all,'lay in the command, which lie had of his own language, and in tho wealth of thought which i found utterance thereby. In his lifetime he was a: brilliant talkor, graceful, humorous, a master of pathos, and never. without an abundanco" of fact and fantasy which lie knew well how to blend together, and in the among his writings his brilliancj is that of a talkor. But throughout hii work tho qualities which served him in con yersation woro a' great part of his power A highly developed sense of relation, of an alogy, of parallelism, and a rare gift o moraory enriched with a groat wealth of il lustration whatever subjeot camo to hand . and hoiliad tlio faculty'of passing easily api naturally from heroics to pathos, or fron pathos to comedy which gave tlio grace o tumanness to his learning. Thore must b added too a certain; light-heartedness whio. could move forward'at command into a vor daring humour; a light-heartedness supei ficial indeed but welcome tP us and neces sary to him; a thing imminent always, lm ininent even in what seemed despair. ; Fo such a man there was some temptation t forget the dignity which belongs to language . and to require of it a supplenoss which witl out loss of . strength it could not give, bu Do Quincey knew his art too well for sue an orror; ho had tho instinct of the tru craftsman, and respected always the languag which ho had mado so completely his sei vant. In the "Confessions," which are hi most sustained ofFort and also tho first mom mnnt of his failuro, his prose,' if too rarol exalted as ho could exalt it, is never at an point debased, But it was this very powe of exalting languago that was De Quincey greatest' gift. The inspiration of a. poe the trained taste of a scholar, these wei

a part,of it,but there was added something boyond these, His whole outlook upon tlio world, his grief, his pleasure and his tnought, woro all enriched by a deep love of boauty, a vory perfect, sense of lino and colour and melody. Languago hac{ become in his hands the absolute mirror of his thought, and this inspiration of beauty might have set him as an artist in our English tongue higher than any that havo been. Indeod, there are fragments in tho "Confessions," moro perhaps in the "Suspiria," sorao in all his work,, fragments of languago whoso rare beauty, whether of richness or simplicity, of passion or calm, givo promise of a prose painter greater than Ruskin and a maker of melodios greater than Sir-Thomas Browne. Tho most perfect among these jewels cannot bo takon-from thoir. setting without ruin, and often the art is not of a sentenco or a phraso but of a paragraph or it may be of a page, but there are passages of less beauty which still show something ,of his power. Hero is speed painted as \it;;has' 'not f often been ; "Systems of Sarcophagi rose with crests aerial of terraces and turrets into tho upper gloom, strode forward with haughty intrusion upon the central aislo, ran back with mighty shadows into answoring recosses" .... "Like rivors in flood wheeling about the headlands, like hurricanes that ride into the spcrets 'of forests, - faster than ever light unwovo the mazes';of darkness, our flying oquipago carried.; earthly passions, kindled warrior instincts,-amongst the dust that lay around us—dust oftentimes of our noble fathers who had slept in God from Crecy to Trafalgar." Those lines are from the "Dream Fuguo" as first lie-cast its; form, and surely in them he uses language';as'men use an organ to shake the oar . with the music of power and speed. "What ttiop'of the poet here: "Battlefields that long since nature has healed and reconciled to herself with the sweet oblivion of flowers." Groat .was ■> the treasure which De Quincey held in trust', a treasure of thought, of colour and of melody.;'but small were thojjifts ; he made from it' ,to the world. His writings aro a valued 'possijssion of our language, but in worth and seriousness thoy are an insult to the power who made possible to him far greater, things.". It was his punishment to know that lie had failed. j The speds of, failure. had beon oarly sown. ( Opium was not the . beginning of evils, for , by nature lie was deficient in the moral bal- ' ( last which makes continuity of purpose pos- ( 'siblo', *and'"earlj'3ni life mental indolence liad himlorot] its development. /''At no time had j he been absolutely in the grip of hjs own £ will, and'under'the influence of opium ho f became more and more decentralised., His , powers were always great, b\ft.tho action was/uncertain/, ten, proportion, perspec- 1 tivej'balance seemed to- leavo him altogether, ! and as a thinker/.ho; beeamo somotimes incapable 'of sustained and ordered reason. Ho began countless articles in which tho unchecked exuberanco of his thought ohoked ! progress 1 and mado their continuance impossible. Each faculty in its kind was weak- ' eiied by the dulling of 1 central vitality, and yet the disintegration, was not a regular and : strange process,' for it is one of the strange things in his strange hißtory that to the end i bad "alternated'with" good, and power rose and, fell .like the. waves of .an unquiet sea. i The'/patbos 'tfcat' 'wasUomotiraes tragio was sometimes thin, and shrill in its appeal; tho i passion might be deop and real or only a i passing-plaintivoriess; the imaginings, which ] had often in'them tho beauty of strong lifo, were often bloodless things. As an artist in languago . his gifts had been supreme, and his failures in tho, uso of them, form, tho saddest tragedy Through all his days ho. was able to recoivo impressions of : beauty, and his Iqvo for lino and colour and melody did not fail him,' but too often* there,, was wanting that measure of dynamic vitality which can., turn reception - into.' creation.—' j •"Saturday Review." literature AND PROPERTY. | i Some two hundred heirs and ropresonta- . tives 'of French"' authors have; just petitioned? to have .litersiry .property-put upon tho same, footing as property in a house or a gem— i in other, words, to : have copyright mado per-,, manont' instead •of temporary. There is :a, good deal to bo said for the logic of the demand that tho labour, of the mind in the" field;of literature is : not less worthy the valiio of its : product".'than tho labour of tho mind-in 'the .field of: business, and the only rejoinder, ..tho., " Temps " can make is that a' nation cannot'afford to admit the olaim. Undoubtedly litofaturo is a national necessity : accoss . to ; w'hiclv, should bo easy .and cheap, and copyright moans that access to it must bo costly ahd therefore restricted. Unfortunately,' the »botter the literature tho moro "'necessary" : 'it is - and the more valuable ■ is tho copyright, and 'therefore thovgroater woulcj he the-national in-, jurv done by extending tho period of copyright.' -The copyright of,-tho novel of tho ; day would soil for. as. much if it held,good.' for ten years-as if,it held good for eternity, and'tho world could contemplate oithor torm with equanimity"; but where should wo bo if Shakespeare and Milton and Chaucer were loaded with' cbiiyright . dues till the crack of doom? •What this means is that tho State has : all along realised tho supremo national importance of things of tho spirit as a-consideration...to-whioh. more privato interest- must, be 'subjected. That is' a distinction ,which". falls rather inequitably upon a sirigle.;and,'rfar from' ; the most prosperous class of'.workers—a distinction in which deprivatiotf of roward-varies directly with the merit br tho dop'rived. But the State will not- on that account accept the suggestion of the two hundred. The tendency rather is to extend;,; subject, to existing legal rights, the principle of literary copyright to othor forms of property'as the nation comes to the conviction that other-tilings aro as vital to national woll-being ;as'literature.—"Manohest'or Guardian." .