It is needless to say that an English poet with such feelings must be, if not vigorous, liberal, and original, at least ambitious of becoming such, and this Clough is. A vigorous naturalism, such as is becoming half the religion and all the art of the scholars and thinkers of the present day, inspires every page. Truthful yet picturesque, he is more than pleasant to read, he is good _to think_, and most relishing to _feel_ with. Had he been a meaner mind, he would have been a mere Adam Bede-ish pre-Raffaelite in word-painting--'the Bothie of Taber-na-vuolich,' the first poem in this volume is often photographic in its rural views, as well as in its characters. As it is, literal nature is to him material for fresh brave thought. Through all his poems, owing to this simple vigorous truth, and an innate sense of refinement, he rises head and shoulders above the 'sweet-pretty' Miss Nancy Coventry Patmores or spasmodic Alexander Smiths or other cotemporary English stuff of later poetry. England has of late years deluged and wearied us so much with thousand times told tales of herself and her social life, and her writers have run so _exceedingly_ in ruts, that there are few really thinking men in America who have not begun to tire woefully of her endless novels and worn-out poetry. We could write against the whole '_connu, connu_,' and at the end a 'deliver us'--from evil it might be, certainly from no great temptation. Let the world believe it--it _will_ some day--English _thought_ is at present exhausted, stagnant, and imitative. It is cursed with mannerism, even as the Chinese are cursed, and every honest man of mind knows it. In such a state of national art it is cheerful to open a volume like these poems, in which one hears, as it were, the first lark-notes of an early dawn and sees from afar a few gleams of morning red. It is not the full light nor the great poetry which reforms and awakes nations, but it is the forerunner in many things of such, and will be read with great pleasure by those who long for some faint realization of the great Nature-Art of the future. EDITOR'S TABLE