In, in, out and in, Blaws the wind and whirls the whin: The _Jacobite’s Exile_— O lordly flow the Loire and Seine, And loud the dark Durance: But bonnier shine the braes of Tyne Than a’ the fields of France; And the waves of Till that speak sae still Gleam goodlier where they glance: _The Tyneside Widow_ and _A Reiver’s Neck-verse_ are all poems of fine imaginative power, and some of them are terrible in their fierce intensity of passion. There is no danger of English poetry narrowing itself to a form so limited as the romantic ballad in dialect. It is of too vital a growth for that. So we may welcome Mr. Swinburne’s masterly experiments with the hope that things which are inimitable will not be imitated. The collection is completed by a few poems on children, some sonnets, a threnody on John William Inchbold, and a lovely lyric entitled _The Interpreters_. In human thought have all things habitation; Our days Laugh, lower, and lighten past, and find no station That stays. But thought and faith are mightier things than time Can wrong, Made splendid once by speech, or made sublime By song. Remembrance, though the tide of change that rolls Wax hoary, Gives earth and heaven, for song’s sake and the soul’s, Their glory. Certainly, ‘for song’s sake’ we should love Mr. Swinburne’s work, cannot, indeed, help loving it, so marvellous a music-maker is he. But what of the soul? For the soul we must go elsewhere. _Poems and Ballads_. Third Series. By Algernon Charles Swinburne. (Chatto and Windus.) A CHINESE SAGE (_Speaker_, February 8, 1890.) An eminent Oxford theologian once remarked that his only objection to modern progress was that it progressed forward instead of backward—a view that so fascinated a certain artistic undergraduate that he promptly wrote an essay upon some unnoticed analogies between the development of ideas and the movements of the common sea-crab. I feel sure the _Speaker_ will not be suspected even by its most enthusiastic friends of holding this dangerous heresy of retrogression. But I must candidly admit that I have come to the conclusion that the most caustic criticism of modern life I have met with for some time is that contained in the writings of the learned Chuang Tzŭ, recently translated into the vulgar tongue by Mr. Herbert Giles, Her Majesty’s Consul at Tamsui. The spread of popular education has no doubt made the name of this great thinker quite familiar to the general public, but, for the sake of the few and the over-cultured, I feel it my duty to state definitely who he was, and to give a brief outline of the character of his philosophy.