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Typo: A Monthly Newspaper and Literary Review, Volume 7

Among the Books

page 3

Among the Books.

Mr. McHutchison's Camp-Life in Fjord-Land contains a valuable literary note. « Ossian's personal existence, » says the author, « may be no better authenticated than that of Homer, but that some great minstrel lived and sang among the mists and sea-foam of the western isles is at least quite certain. » To this sentence he adds the following footnote: « Since the above was in type, Mr D. M. Luckie, of Wellington, informed the writer that fully 36 years ago he personally knew of « several very old Highland women being discovered by a Gaelic minister in a lonely glen in Caithness-shire, and who although unable to read and write, and ignorant of the English tongue, repeated many verses from Ossian which agreed with Macpherson's translations, and had been orally handed down from fathers and mothers for many generations. » Mr Luckie adds—« I believe that the so-called Ossianic poetry existed for many hundred years among the Celtic race, just as the Homeric poetry dwelt among the ancient Greeks; and that Macpherson in his travels though the Scottish Highlands gathered the verses of the oral Celtic or Ossianic traditions from the mouths of the Gaelic story-tellers, in a manner similar to that pursued by Pisistratus, the « Tyrant » of Athens, who twenty-five centuries since made or caused to be made collections of the floating poems of Homer as they came from the lips of the wandering Greek rhapsodists, the minnesingers of that far-back era. »

The hon. W. P. Reeves has published a little poem entitled « The Passing of the Forest. » It contains some beautiful passages, and, but for a certain artificiality of style which suggests an intellectual exercise rather than an expression of feeling, it would be a really fine poem. It opens well:

All cannot fade that glorifies the hills;
Their strength remains, their aspect of command,
Their flush of color when the evening stills
Day's clamor, and their rose when morn's at hand.

The fourth, fifth, and sixth stanzas are the best:

Gone is the forest world, its wealth of life,
Its jostling, crowdin g, struggling, thrusting race,
Creeper with creeper, bush with bush at strife,
Warring and wrestling for a breathing space;
Below, a realm with tangled rankness rife,
Above, tree columns, shafts of stateliest grace.
Gone is the forest nation. None might stay,
Giant and dwarf alike have passed away.

Gone are the forest birds, arboreal things,
Eaters of honey, honey-sweet in song;
The tui, and the bell-bird—he who sings
That brief, rich music one would fain prolong.
Gone the wood-pigeon's sudden whirr of wings,
The daring robin, quite unused to wrong;
Wild, harmless, hamadryad creatures, they
Lived with their trees, and died, and passed away.

Gone are the forest tracks, where oft we rode
Under the silver fern-fronds, climbing slow,
In cool green tunnels, though fierce noontide glowed
And glittered on the tree-tops far below.
There, 'mid the stillness of the mountain road,
We just could hear the valley river flow,
Whose voice through many a windless summer day
Haunted the silent woods now passed away.

There are eight stanzas in all; and the last is weak, the closing sentiment being somewhat awkwardly expressed.

Amelie Rives, known as the writer of erotic and occasionally profane stories, has been dabbling in theology. Writing in the North American Review, on « Innocence versus Ignorance, » she says: A little girl whom I know once asked her mother this sufficiently puzzling question:—« Mother, dear, our Lord said to the poor thief, 'This day shalt thou be with me in paradise,' and then went down to hell for three days. Now please explain to me how that was. » A friend suggested that « a thousand years with the Lord were as one day, » and the child contented herself with this answer, whereas, if her question had been waived in the usual manner, it would have probably led to that religious brooding from which children so often suffer. — Perhaps the narrator of the anecdote was herself the « friend. » But it is not easy to believe that a child thoughtful and intelligent enough to propound such a question, could have accepted as satisfactory so stupid and dishonest an evasion.

Most people will be interested to learn from a note of Canon Ainger in his new volume, « Tennyson for the Young » (Macmillan), that « Crossing the Bar, » the last poem of the Laureate's last volume, was written in Lord Tennyson's eighty-first year, on a day that he journeyed across the Solent from Aldworth to Faringforth.

Miss Charlotte Yonge, says a contemporary, has recently completed half a century of literary life. She was a hard worker at juvenile literature long before 1853, when the « Heir of Redclyffe » made her famous. She has always been deeply interested in missionary work in southern seas. The present generation of New Zealanders may not know that the profits of the « Heir of Redclyffe » fitted out Bishop Selwyn's mission schooner, the Southern Cross, or that the « Daisy Chain » went a long way towards building the Missionary College, at Auckland. In appearance Miss Yonge is a a beautiful old lady with snow-white hair, gentle kindly eyes, a soft smile, and winning manners.

The Pope has written and published a volume of poems. The book is described by the correspondent of the Daily News. He says: « The volume is in white binding, with delicate gold ornaments; the back in moire silk. The book is beautifully got up, and the vignettes and ornamental letters were simply exquisite. They were faintly tinted, some in blue, or rose, or green, or slightly silvered. » He says nothing about the contents. Only one hundred copies were printed.

A classical scholar of great industry and high mental worth has just been lost to Italy and the republic of letters in the Abbe Dr Vincenzo De Vit, who died recently in the Alta Italia at Domodossola, in the province of Novara. He was a native of Padua, where he was born on the 10th July, 1811. The great work of his life, and which still remains incomplete by his death, is his Totius Latinitatis Ono-masticum, a full and detailed account of all the proper names—mythological, historical, and geographical—to be met with in the Latin writers. The familiarity it reveals with the poets and prose authors, with the epigraphy and fragments of the Latin language, is truly marvellous, and has proved of signal assistance to compilers, who have not always had the grace to acknowledge whence their information was drawn.

M. Zola, in writting his last novel, which took him fifteen months, is said to have filled 1,033 sheets of paper. Figaro inproves the occasion with some further statistics, such as that M. Zola used 500 goose-quills, of which 225 had white and the remainder yellow beaks, except for the last chapter, which he wrote with a steel nib, so as to be more forcible; that he consumed five and one-fourth pints of black ink and half a pint of red (which inspires him when his imagination fails), that he was twice compelled to renew his blotting-pad on account of accidents with the inkstand, with other details of similar significance. « As to the novel, » the satirist concludes, « we say nothing. That is of no importance. »

The following very interesting literary note is from a correspondent of the London Standard, who signs himself V.R.R.:—« The incident in the life of Ada, Lady Lovelace, mentioned in your review of Gossip of the Century, would point to greater filial dereliction on the part of Byron's daughter than she was actually guilty of. Sixteen months before her death she paid a visit to the home of her ancestors, and in the great library, Colonel Wildman, the then proprietor of Newstead Abbey, quoted a passage from Byron's works to Byron's daughter, and she, touched by the beauty of the words, inquired the name of the author. For reply, Colonel Wildman pointed to the painting of her father which hung on the library wall. It came as a revelation to her; instantly she confessed that she was brought up in complete ignorance of all that regarded her father. From that time Lady Lovelace devoted herself to a close study of her father's life and works. The loss of the affection of that noble heart, which had so long been kept from her, preyed upon her mind. She fell ill—so ill, that she knew she could never hope to recover. In this last illness she wrote Colonel Wildman a letter begging to be buried beside her father. 'Yes, I will be buried there; not where my mother can join me, but by the side of him who so loved me, and whom I was not taught to love; and this reunion of our bodies in the grave shall be an emblem of the union of our spirits in the bosom of the Eternal.' The father and daughter lie side by side in the village church of Hucknall. »

A man at Sydney, charged with vagrancy, pleaded that he was engaged in writing a book, and handed up a voluminous manuscript. The magistrate gave him three months.