_Embroidery and Lace_: _Their Manufacture and History from the Remotest Antiquity to the Present Day_. Translated and enlarged by Alan S. Cole from the French of Ernest Lefébure. (Grevel and Co.) HENLEY’S POEMS (_Woman’s World_, December 1888.) ‘If I were king,’ says Mr. Henley, in one of his most modest rondeaus, ‘Art should aspire, yet ugliness be dear; Beauty, the shaft, should speed with wit for feather; And love, sweet love, should never fall to sere, If I were king.’ And these lines contain, if not the best criticism of his own work, certainly a very complete statement of his aim and motive as a poet. His little _Book of Verses_ reveals to us an artist who is seeking to find new methods of expression and has not merely a delicate sense of beauty and a brilliant, fantastic wit, but a real passion also for what is horrible, ugly, or grotesque. No doubt, everything that is worthy of existence is worthy also of art—at least, one would like to think so—but while echo or mirror can repeat for us a beautiful thing, to render artistically a thing that is ugly requires the most exquisite alchemy of form, the most subtle magic of transformation. To me there is more of the cry of Marsyas than of the singing of Apollo in the earlier poems of Mr. Henley’s volume, _In Hospital_: _Rhymes and Rhythms_, as he calls them. But it is impossible to deny their power. Some of them are like bright, vivid pastels; others like charcoal drawings, with dull blacks and murky whites; others like etchings with deeply-bitten lines, and abrupt contrasts, and clever colour-suggestions. In fact, they are like anything and everything, except perfected poems—that they certainly are not. They are still in the twilight. They are preludes, experiments, inspired jottings in a note-book, and should be heralded by a design of ‘Genius Making Sketches.’ Rhyme gives architecture as well as melody to verse; it gives that delightful sense of limitation which in all the arts is so pleasurable, and is, indeed, one of the secrets of perfection; it will whisper, as a French critic has said, ‘things unexpected and charming, things with strange and remote relations to each other,’ and bind them together in indissoluble bonds of beauty; and in his constant rejection of rhyme, Mr. Henley seems to me to have abdicated half his power. He is a _roi en exil_ who has thrown away some of the strings of his lute; a poet who has forgotten the fairest part of his kingdom. However, all work criticizes itself. Here is one of Mr. Henley’s inspired jottings. According to the temperament of the reader, it will serve either as a model or as the reverse: As with varnish red and glistening Dripped his hair; his feet were rigid; Raised, he settled stiffly sideways: You could see the hurts were spinal.