Jesus and Joseph at work! Hurra! Sight never to see again, A prentice Deity plies the saw, While the Master ploughs with the plane. Poems of this kind were popular in the Middle Ages when the cathedrals of every Christian country served as its theatres. They are anachronisms now, and it is odd that they should come to us from the United States. In matters of this kind we should have some protection. (1) Lays and Legends. By E. Nesbit. (Longmans, Green and Co.) (2) Rebecca the Witch and Other Tales. By David Skaats Foster. (G. P. Putnam's Sons.) (3) Poems and Songs. By John Renton Denning. (Bombay: Education Society's Press.) (4) Poems. By Joseph McKim. (Kegan Paul.) (5) In the Watches of the Night. Poems in eighteen volumes. By Mrs. Horace Dobell. Vol. xvii. (Remington and Co.) (6) Poems. By James Kelly. (Glasgow: Reid and Coghill.) (7) Andiatorocte. By the Rev. Clarence A. Walworth. (G. P. Putnam's Sons.) A NOTE ON SOME MODERN POETS (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