Not Spring--too lavish of her bud and leaf-- But Autumn with sad eyes and brows austere, When fields are bare, and woods are brown and sere, And leaden skies weep their enchantless grief. Spring is so much too bright, since Spring is brief, And in our hearts is Autumn all the year, Least sad when the wide pastures are most drear And fields grieve most--robbed of the last gold sheaf. These too, the opening stanzas of The Last Envoy, are charming: The Wind, that through the silent woodland blows O'er rippling corn and dreaming pastures goes Straight to the garden where the heart of Spring Faints in the heart of Summer's earliest rose. Dimpling the meadow's grassy green and grey, By furze that yellows all the common way, Gathering the gladness of the common broom, And too persistent fragrance of the may-- Gathering whatever is of sweet and dear, The wandering wind has passed away from here, Has passed to where within your garden waits The concentrated sweetness of the year. But Miss Nesbit is not to be judged by mere extracts. Her work is too rich and too full for that. Mr. Foster is an American poet who has read Hawthorne, which is wise of him, and imitated Longfellow, which is not quite so commendable. His Rebecca the Witch is a story of old Salem, written in the metre of Hiawatha, with a few rhymes thrown in, and conceived in the spirit of the author of The Scarlet Letter. The combination is not very satisfactory, but the poem, as a piece of fiction, has many elements of interest. Mr. Foster seems to be quite popular in America. The Chicago Times finds his fancies 'very playful and sunny,' and the Indianapolis Journal speaks of his 'tender and appreciative style.' He is certainly a clever story-teller, and The Noah's Ark (which 'somehow had escaped the sheriff's hand') is bright and amusing, and its pathos, like the pathos of a melodrama, is a purely picturesque element not intended to be taken too seriously. We cannot, however, recommend the definitely comic poems. They are very depressing. Mr. John Renton Denning dedicates his book to the Duke of Connaught, who is Colonel-in-Chief of the Rifle Brigade, in which regiment Mr. Denning was once himself a private soldier. His poems show an ardent love of Keats and a profligate luxuriance of adjectives: And I will build a bower for thee, sweet, A verdurous shelter from the noonday heat, Thick rustling ivy, broad and green, and shining, With honeysuckle creeping up and twining Its nectared sweetness round thee; violets And daisies with their fringed coronets And the white bells of tiny valley lilies, And golden-leaved narcissi--daffodillies Shall grow around thy dwelling--luscious fare Of fruit on which the sun has laughed;