7.-1. Nero: An Historical Play. By W. W. STORY. William Blackwood & Sons: Edinburgh and London. Scribner, Welford, and Armstrong: New York. 1875. 2. Rose and Roof-Tree: Poems. By GEORGE PARSONS LATHROP. Boston: James R. Osgood & Company. 1875. 3. The New Day: a Poem in Songs and Sonnets. By RICHARD WatSON GILDER. New York: Scribner, Armstrong, & Co. 1876. 4. Cartoons. By MARGARET J. PRESTON. Boston: Roberts Brothers. 1875. 5. The Ship in the Desert. By JOAQUIN MILLER. Boston: Roberts Brothers. 1875. 6. Guido and Lita: a Tale of the Riviera. By THE RIGHT HONORABLE, THE MARQUIS OF LORNE. New York: Macmillan & Co. 1875. THE first misfortune for a work of art or literature is, that its subject should be a cause of regret. It is like stumbling on the threshold. Mr. Story is not the first who has found matter for a tragedy in the reign of Nero, but he is the first who has attempted to dramatize the whole. There are few of his admirers who will not lament the choice of such a theme; it lacks all that can move us, except to horror and disgust; and there is a coarseness almost inseparable from it (which Mr. Story has not eschewed in dealing with it), alien to the genius of our times. To say the least it was a bold attempt, and that it is not a total failure is the best proof of the author's talent. The final test of the specific merit of any dramatic work is its fitness for representation; judged by this standard, Nero is more successful than any composition of the same class which has appeared within many years. Whether Swinburne's, Browning's, or Tennyson's tragedies be performed or not (and we believe the experiment has been tried in the case of the two last mentioned), they are essentially unsuitable for the stage, whereas, with some adaptation, Nero would make a most effective play. As it stands, it needs compression; its length weakens it. There are many scenes which serve no purpose except that of following the historic narrative with exactness; such are Scenes V. and VI., Act III., and the two scenes in the camp in Spain, Act V.; a phrase or two in another place would supply the links without hampering the action. Those also in which the death of Seneca and Poppea is protracted are hurtful both to the general and particular effect. The episode of Sporus is unfit to be performed, and the play would lose nothing by leaving it out. In Scene I., Act III., Agrippina, finding that her authority over her son is gone, strives to maintain her influence by her charm as a mere woman, a terrible situation, for which, as in everything else, Mr. Story has the warrant of history; depicted with power, it is the most telling moment of the drama, and might be given in a French or Italian theatre, but not before an English-speaking audience. The play has vigor and marrow enough, however, to spare it. The same excerption might be practised with good results upon many of the speeches, which are too lengthy; striking dramatic points are lost by multiplying words. Important as these omissions may seem, they would not really touch the core of the play. Nero, Agrippina, and Poppæa have individuality, and set each other in strong relief. Agrippina is an imposing figure, and except that now and then she rails overmuch, is sustained with consistency. Nero's childish peevishness is unpleasantly prominent in the beginning; it may not be out of keeping for him to say, "He's a bore, And for his verses, they 're not worth a straw." But such expressions, and similar ones, are below the dignity of the verse, and taint it occasionally with modern vulgarity. But Nero is a remarkable character; history has given us the elements and outlines, which here are completed and combined; the momentary strength which flashes forth, as in his defiance of his mother at the close of Act II., the childish facility to be pleased, irritated, cowed, are portrayed with skill. These are especially brought out in the early scenes with Poppæa, but the climax is in Act V., Scene VI., when, with the footsteps of fate already sounding in his ears, he gives way by turns to abject cowardice, insensate rage, superstition, and the puerile vanity which is the keynote of his nature. There is a sharpness, a shrill, acrid quality in his passion which sets the nerves on edge without moving the sympathies, exactly as the anguish of vice should do. Besides these principal personages, some of the minor ones, Burrhus, for instance, would be impressive in good hands. The literary merits of a play are so involved with the dramatic, that the finest passages generally lose their effect unless the whole scene can be given. Mr. Story has a defect which he shares with the eminent English poets of the present day; like Molière's M. Jourdain, they make prose without knowing it. Sometimes he is worse than prosaic, he is trite; one may expect occasional platitudes from Seneca, but not from Agrippina. But this is far from the prevailing tone of his dialogue. We give a few striking and poetic sentences which suffer least by being rent from their place in the play : The struggle and the toil that gendered it; And all the past pain lying dark behind Shows like night's background for the lightning flash Of one keen, vivid joy to blaze against." The excellence of much of this tragedy, and the nature of its defects, lead one to suppose that the latter arise chiefly from carelessness, and this suspicion is borne out by the absence of Narcissus and Pallas from the list of dramatis persona, although they appear in the play. Nor should it be forgotten that literature is only Mr. Story's recreation, though it might well have been his vocation. If a poet is not original, the next best thing is to be like one of the great masters of song. Mr. Lathrop has the gift of recalling Tennyson, not by imitation, but by a real resemblance, springing, no doubt, from a kinship of talent. Melancholy, June Longings, the Silent Tide, all have the family likeness, but unluckily it is to the Laureate's weaker features. The rural idyls are not the best or most beautiful of Tennyson's poems, and these are what the Silent Tide reminds one of. There are good lines, faithful descriptions, passages which are almost fine; but the highest praise which can be given to the whole is that it feebly resembles Enoch Arden or Dora. A Rune of the Rain wakes the same reminiscence, not to particular poems, however, but to the spirit, the musical voice, the delicate, true touch of Tennyson in those first two volumes which once made him the idol of a young generation. This is a most lovely and delightful ode, as soothing and refreshing as its theme; not Wordsworth himself was more tenderly intimate with Nature in her weeping moods, nor has found fitter words for them. The April Aria, and Sun-Shower, have some of the same charm, though marred by a few imperfections and affectations. Let it be said in passing, that Mr. Lathrop is not generally affected; whenever he seems so, it strikes us as the consequence of an unsuccessful struggle with his verse, not of a conscious effort, such as grimaces on the pages of almost every rhymester of the present day. The love-poems are full of youth and feeling; Lily Pond has one stanza, as delicate as a picture of Kensett's: "One ripple streaks the little lake, Sharp purple blue; the birches, thin They are all pretty, and worthy to be slipped into the palm of a fair hand, but hardly to be published. We should not mention a poem called Jessamine, but for our wish to remind a number of writers that a burden belongs to the ballad alone, and that a tale in verse is not necessarily a ballad. Here we have a very commonplace story, with its tame quatrains, dragging after them a fifth line rhyming with none other : "And the moon hangs low in the elm.” Helen at the Loom is a study, and more finished in execution than anything else in the book; it contains very fine lines, but there is an inherent defect, unhappily common to too many of the other poems, -lack of thought. The Bobolink, Song-Sparrow, Before the Snow, and even some of those already named for their sweetness and grace, have nothing in them. The absence of the vital principle is sadly felt in the two most serious attempts of the collection, Burial Song for Summer, and Arise, American; Mr. Lathrop has not underestimated the dignity of his subject, but his verse, instead of rising into loftier spheres, wanders about in emptiness, with high-sounding words which produce only a hollow reverberation. There is the same shortcoming in Grief's Hero, but here the inspiration at least is from within, and intimates a capacity for a more elevated strain than could be guessed even from the beautiful Rune of the Rain; Contentment, also, which reads at first like an anagram of some of Wordsworth's little moral poems, contains a grain of this higher quality. The earnest tone which rings through Fairhaven Bay and the Silent Tide inclines us to hope that hereafter Mr. Lathrop, in maturer verse, may find ideas deserving his charming gift of words. Mr. Gilder tells us that the first of his sonnets is "After the Italian." The fact is, that many of them are merely clever imitations of the poems translated by Mr. Rossetti, first published under the title of "The Early Italian Poets," now in a revised edition called "Dante and his Circle." We do not know whether Mr. Gilder be acquainted with these compositions in the original or no, but strongly suspect not; we think the volume before us bears unmistakable trace of the influence of Mr. Rossetti himself, and his fellow-poets and painters. If the Riddle of Lovers, No. I., Love's Cruelty, and half a dozen more of the sonnets recall Mr. Rossetti's renderings from the Italian, Love in Wonder, the first part of The Sower, and portions of other poems suggest no less strikingly the wild-eyed, woebegone apparitions who peer through the briers and torn grasses on the canvas, stained-glass, tiles, and tapestry of the Bloomsbury brotherhood. If Mr. Gilder have not seen and copied these figures it is alarming to think how much of this allegorical extravagance there must be in the air. But this is not the worst of it; these small, fair pages, with their pretty, fanciful woodcuts of flowers and peacock's feathers, are stained with the ferocious coarseness of the mystic-satyr school. This is one of several peculiarities in "The New Day" which rouse a hostility unfavorable to critical calmness. Another is the selfcomplacency which presents us with the following Song :— "My love grew with the growing night, – And my love dawned with the new daylight." A poet must indeed have a conviction of the preciousness of his lines who sets two, or even four, like these, alone in the midst of a page. There is careful work in some of the sonnets, and the result is an occasional effect of considerable dexterity, but it is like old goldsmith's work, or ivory-carving of no high value; even were it firstrate, it would be craft, not art. There is some good word-painting, of which the following water-color sketches are specimens: "A dun, bleak stretch that slants to the salt sea's gray, |