And if I never see her again? I think, if they told me so, I could convulse the heavens with my horror. I think I could alter the frame of things in my agony. I think I could break the System with my heart. I think, in my convulsion, the skies would break. He should change his gear from high to low; he will never climb Parnassus on this speed, not even with his muffler so manifestly open. The _Times_ also quotes without appreciation from the same volume the following passage, where the woman, looking back, stirs a biblical reminiscence. I have seen it, felt it in my mouth, my throat, my chest, my belly, Burning of powerful salt, burning, eating through my defenceless nakedness, I have been thrust into white sharp crystals, Writhing, twisting, superpenetrated, Ah, Lot's wife, Lot's wife! The pillar of salt, the whirling, horrible column of salt, like a waterspout That has enveloped me! Most readers may not need a whole pillar, but they will surely take the above professions _cum grano salis_. It is all in King Cambyses' vein; and I would that we had Pistol to deliver it. I cite it here, not for the graceless task of showing Mr. Lawrence at his worst, but because such stuff symptomatic of many of the very "new" poets, who wander, as Turgenev expressed it, "aimless but declamatory, over the face of our long-suffering mother earth." John Drinkwater, born on the first of June, 1882, has had varied experiences both in business and in literature, and is at present connected with the management of the Birmingham Repertory theatre. Actively engaged in commercial life, he has found time to publish a number of volumes of poems, plays in verse, critical works in prose, and a long string of magazine articles. He has wisely collected in one volume--though I regret the omission of _Malvern Lyrics_--the best of his poems that had previously appeared in four separate works, containing the cream of his production from 1908 to 1914. His preface to this little book, published in 1917, is excellent in its manly modesty. "Apart from the Cromwell poem itself, the present selection contains all that I am anxious to preserve from those volumes, and there is nothing before 1908 which I should wish to be reprinted now or at any time." One of the earlier books had been dedicated to John Masefield, to whom in the present preface the author pays an affectionate compliment--"John Masefield, who has given a poet's praise to work that I hope he likes half as well as I like his." The first poem, _Symbols_, prepares the reader for what is to follow, though it is somewhat lacking in the technique that is characteristic of most of Mr. Drinkwater's verse. I saw history in a poet's song, In a river-reach and a gallows-hill, In a bridal bed, and a secret wrong, In a crown of thorns: in a daffodil.