Joy, all so strangely with sadness blended,
Fond hopes fulfill'd which regret still brought,
Long-cherish'd schemes that in failure ended,
And yet such failure with pleasure fraught.

As the smooth mirror, the form depicting,
Gives back an image revers'd, though true,
So memory, on sorrows past reflecting,

May find them joys on a closer view.

"Ex Eremo" exhibits much more cultivated poetic power than the book we have just passed. Mr. Keene, we should infer, has here done his best, and the result is a volume, which will be read, not with enthusiasm, but with satisfaction, by most cultivated readers. There is little of fire, vigour and enthusiasm in his style; but whilst he never rises into the higher regions of poetry, he seldom falls into grave errors of composition, or below mediocrity. He is never sublime and seldom beautiful; but he is generally agreeable, and never fails to exhibit vigorous thought and devout sentiment. He may be found occasionally obscure, and, though usually a careful writer, now and then slovenly, whilst his transitions are sometimes too abrupt, and his exhibition of human feeling and passion is limited in its range; but those defects are combined with excellencies which we have no wish to overlook; indeed, we are inclined to give Mr. Keene a high place amongst our Indian minstrels.

Of the longest poem in the volume we shall say but little. It is the narrative of an adventurer who, at the commencement of Britain's sovereignty in the East, was led by the decay of his house to seek its restoration in India. It is a well told tale of bold adventure, and of baffled lust for gold. An air of naturalness and probability runs through the whole narrative, whilst the conclusion, though too abrupt, is finely conceived. Michael De Mas, after gaining and losing more than one fortune in India, and losing what is still more precious, his virtue and his honor, in his too ardent pursuit after wealth, leaves India with the wrecks of his fortune, that he may, to the eastward, make one more effort to gain the means of restoring the glory of his name, which however had been lost only for a season, for the family estate had been recovered by the fidelity of an old servant; but the heir could not be found :

:

"There was a nine days' wonder; men inquired,

Where was the man whose wealth, without an heir,

(So lost, so wonderfully won again.

But after his departure, by the faith

Of an old servant, thought to have been slain,)

Was fabulously splendid?" And some said,

"There was a will; all he might have was left
To strangers' -" to a lady he had loved."
It was the year that filled the century

From Michael's birth, when he was seen again."

A band of adventurers in California find his remains :

Here, with the lumps of ore heaped high around,

They found a human skeleton; hard by,

A rusty cutlass, such as mariners use

Whereon was rudely graven, and half-effaced, The words " Michael De Mas," and underneath, "I die of want upon a bed of gold."

:

Another poem of some length is called "the Wanderer;" it has probably been suggested by Wordsworth's Excursion. It strikes us as being one of the least successful of Mr. Keene's efforts, for though it contains agreeable reflections and just sentiments, it is somewhat desultory and vague in its general outlines. The following extract from "Day Dreams" affords a very fair illustration of the prevailing character both of Mr. Keene's poetry and style of thought :

"Where summer is, there 'tis fresh and fair,
For forest and field are gay,

When the sun looks down on tower and town,
That smile beneath his ray.
Upon the hills the morning breeze

Still whispers in the yellow broom,
The poplar throws a quivering shade,
The oak-tree sheds a broader gloom,
And in the hazel thicket hangs

The silence of a tomb.

But shades come o'er the face of day,
Tempering afresh the genial May,
The light air softly drops,

And nestles in the tall tree-heads,
And stirs the violets in the glades,
The spraylets in the copse.

In such an hour as this

The earth-impeded soul,

Entranced with nature's bliss,

Surmounts the bear-watched pole,

And the great space wherein the firm spheres roll;

Knows of a brighter sun,

Basks in his beams,

Sees crystal waters run,

And drinks their streams,

And spreads her wings and floats into the land of dreams."

But he gives us unfortunately lines that are less carefully wrought; take the following as a specimen :

"In the long dawn of vernal day,

How often have I burst away,

young woodbine,

Fared gaily through the sleeping town,
And wandered to the woods alone.
The bee hummed in the eglantine,
And the breeze swayed the curls of the
The May scented the hedges along,
The lark was above like a star of song;
Through the hay-hung lanes we go
Over the style, across the meadow,
Where the swift streams whispering flow,
Where the black pools sleep in shadow,
Where the angler seeks his sport,
That Verdurer of nature's court,
Who never lets his occupation

Balk him of happy contemplation."

Some of the rhymes in this extract are unbearable, as "town," "alone;""eglantine," "woodbine;" whilst the two last lines are very defective in versification and poetry; and the last but two is both fanciful and obscure. Other faults there are, but we have pointed out a sufficient number.

Whilst we are in the croaking strain, we may as well indulge our vein a little further. In a short poem suggested by the fine expression of Schiller, "Death cannot be an evil for it is universal,"-occurs the line

The idea is as repulsive as it is false. The theology of Mr. Keene is equally defective when he says:

"In His sight how little differ

Very bad and very good."

The word "long" in the following lines looks too much as if it had been introduced to make a rhyme; the inversion of language moreover is unpleasant :—

"The burden of the world's old song

Must have its share of truth,

That the most honoured life and long
Was happier in youth."

The least effective and satisfactory performance in the volume, we consider to be a short drama on "the Origin of Caste." There is an air of flippancy and levity about it which strikes us as being quite incompatible with the frightful evil whose rise it professes to relate. But it really does not explain to us, in any way that can be called satisfactory, how this curse of India arose. Satan would be ashamed of such a meagre contrivance as Mr. Keene attributes to him.

The most carefully conceived and best executed of the longer

poems is, "The Twins; a Rosicrucian mystery." The story is a very complicated one, but it is full of deep interest, and the air of mystery and romance which is thrown over it, is made the more attractive because of the skill with which the natural and supernatural are combined. Albertus an Alchemist at length has his wish gratified by being told that he shall have two sons. The sylph who conveys to him this information, points him to two stars, the symbols of his children's destiny

- As he gazed

Two stars shone forth, where clouds had been before;
Yet not with equal lustre; one still waned
And paled and flickered as the other burned
And so they shone alternate.

The sylph was saying

"See thy sons,"

The father rightly interpreted the sign

Albertus' brain was troubled, for he knew
The saying of the air-born was not false,
And that his children would be like those stars,
Mysteriously united, all their lives,

To hang dependent one upon the other,

That when one erred, the other straight should mourn,

When one did good, the other fall away;

And fear there was, if one should die in peace,

The other should receive extreme despair

As his companion everlastingly.

In their chequered lives this alternation of good and evil occurs. As the one is visited with emotions of fraternal love, the other as surely is possessed with feelings of fratricidal hate. Their lives are ever in juxtaposition.

We have said enough to exhibit the prevailing qualities of "Ex Eremo," but notwithstanding its length we cannot refrain from extracting one of Mr. Keene's best poems. We hope the sentiments it unfolds are not rare amongst us :

As on her faithful Edward's breast Emilia's head reclined,
He gazed on her with tenderness, while fear came o'er his mind;
For he thought her perfect features showed a presage of decay;
And "Oh, the lady of my love," he said, "she fades away!
The sun of this wild land is bright, but deadly is his glare,
And poison loads the gales and rains of all the livelong year.
My labours, too, are fameless here-all joyless every feast-
My soul is sick for freedom from this weary, weary East.

O for the breeze so pure though chill, the sun, though weak, so kind,
A crust of bread from day to day, with health of frame and mind,
And the voices of our children never absent from our hearth,
And gladness in the garden-plots, where bees and birds make mirth-
And in the end the old churchyard, with two green mounds of earth."
"Ah! not from you," the lady said, and her timid eyelash fell;
"Oh! not from you those false weak words my own heart knows so well;
SEPT., 1857.

с

We were not born for happiness in this stern world of toil,
Nor are we of the forest growth whose souls are in the soil:
Whatever land we start from, dear, the goal is still the same,
And he who steers for duty's light must never think of fame.
Our fates are but our motives, and (if this is any balm)
Think if an age of pleasure can be worth an hour of calm,
Of deep and settled peace, with which, before the day is done,
And the weary march is ended, we may watch the setting sun;-
So if duty be a burthen, 'twill be lighter borne by two,
And if you will struggle on, love, I will struggle here with you."
He kissed her ample brow, as sweet peace came o'er his breast
And let not any seek to know (I cannot tell) the rest-
If he lived to share with her he loved a few bright years at least,
Or one, or both, have left their bones to moulder in the East;
Or whether they enjoyed, or not, what worldly men call bliss,
"Twere vain to ask, and vain to tell: the moral is not this.

We come now to the last of the works before us. For more than one reason, Miss Leslie's poems have stronger claims on our notice as Calcutta Reviewers than the others we have noticed. She has lived, we believe, from her childhood in India. She has had no opportunity of observing nature, save as it is presented to us in Bengal; she is besides a young writer, and we may therefore expect from her apparent love of "the gentle art," that her first appearance as an authoress will not be her last. The publication in Calcutta of a good-sized volume of poetry, which really proves that the writer is endowed with the "gift divine" and which gives promise of yet further progress in excellence, is of importance in the history of Anglo-Indian literature. We are prepared therefore to bid Miss Leslie welcome, and whilst we recognise her merits, we wish not to hide her defects.

A reviewer's task is never so responsible as when he takes in hand the first productions of a young poet. He may kill, as the Quarterly did Keats; he may envenom, as the Edinburgh did Byron; or he may mislead, as a somewhat extravagant Scottish critic now living is said to have misled half a dozen of our young English poets. It is perfectly natural that young writers should wish to know what opinions are formed of their productions; these productions constitute in their estimation a standard by which their reputation is to be judged: to them judicious advice may be of essential service, whilst on the other hand, indiscriminate laudation may confirm them in error, or undue severity may crush and blight minds of great worth and power.

"Ina" is a dramatic narrative, occupying two-thirds of the volume before us. Its perusal at once suggests the enquiry, is ability to conceive a skilful and elaborate plan an essential attribute of a poet? We reply in the negative; at the same time let us add that no one will be a poet of the first order, unless to perfection of detail in the composition of poetry he unite the