NOTICES OF BOOKS. 
193 
“ But this you must know, that as long as they grow, 
Whatever change may be. 
You never can teach either oak or beech 
To be aught but a greenwood tree.” 
“ The tale,” says Mr. Richard Garnett, in his introduction to the work, “ is- 
the concentration of the love of sylvan nature fostered by years of an open-air 
life and perpetual rambles in Windsor Forest and by the banks of the Thames.” 
The recent death of John Greenleaf Whittier, the “ Quaker poet,” in his 
eighty-fifth year, has deprived us of another of the band of American singers who 
have become almost as popular in England as in their own country. Like Long- 
fellow, he had a keen appreciation of nature, and his presentment of certain 
aspects of North American vegetation was graphic and accurate. Such poems as 
“ April,” “ Hazel Blossoms,” and many more, breathe the true spirit of the 
nature lover ; while to this is joined his characteristic style of reflection in such 
verses as “ The May Flower,” or “ The Last Walk in Autumn,” from which we 
take the following descriptive verse : — 
“ Along the river's summer walk, 
The withered tufts and asteis nod. 
And trembles on its arid stalk 
The hoar plume of the golden rod. 
And on a ground of sombre fir. 
And azure-studded juniper. 
The silver birch its buds of purple shows. 
And scarlet berries tell where bloomed the sweet wild rose.” 
Messrs. F. Warne and Co. send us the “Albion” edition of Whittier’s- 
Poetical Works (3s. 6d.), a handsome volume of 576 pages; Messrs. Mac- 
millan and Co. have published an edition de luxe of his complete works in seven 
volumes (6s. each), the “ Poems of Nature” being collected in the second of 
these. 
We are sorry that we cannot swell the chorus of favourable notices which 
Mr. H. G. Groser’s Atlantis, and other Poems (Hutchinson, 2s. 6d.) has called 
forth. The verses are smooth, but we cannot agree with the Daily Telegraph 
that they are a “happy exception to the rule of mediocrity.” The odium t/u- 
ologicum is not wanting, and that which has been styled “ the sincerest flattery” 
is conspicuous — not only in “The Fight of the Little ‘Content,’” which recalls 
throughout another fight, that of “ ‘ The Revenge’” — a comparison which is not 
to Mr. Groser’s advantage — but in other instances. Selbornians are always glad to 
hear the praises of St. Francis — “ St. P'rancis D’Assisi,” as Mr. Groser styles him. 
— but what is the authority for the statement embodied in the following verse ? 
“ And when around his dying bed 
In the hushed cell his brethren drew. 
About the moon-lit bars o’erhead 
A feathered throng complaining flew. 
And at his passing, gyre on gyre. 
Through the frost silence rose and rang 
The music of a skylark choir : 
And till the grey sad dawn they sang.” 
We cannot say much in favour of The Young Naturalists : A Book for Boys 
and Girls, by Minnie M’Kean (Paisley, Gardner, no date). The book is well- 
intentioned, and the author has steered clear of “ howlers,” but the information 
given is meagre, the illustrations are very poor, and misspellings are sadly too fre- 
quent: e.g., “ P'oramenifera” (more than once), “ Aveus” for “Avens” (four times). 
There is also far too much of what by courtesy is styled “ poetry.” Miss M’Kean 
falls into the common error of being child/r/i when she wishes to be chWdlike ; 
and so she talks of “ Lady Mollusca ” and “ Little Lady Arachnida ” — “ isn’t she 
a funny little thing ? ” — and tells us what the midge “ thinks to itself in midgey 
language;” she calls the sun-dews “clever little mites,” and speaks of “a 
botanist named P'ucho,” after whom the “Fuschia” was named. A member of 
“ our club” concludes a paper on the Daisy with — “ I wonder if Spenser knew 
‘what the moonbeam said to the daisy?’ If he didn’t I could have told him_ 
‘ You shut up ! ’” We will take the hint. 
