156 
NATURE NOTES. 
an unbroken line from progenitors who perhaps flourished 
before the advent of man. What countless numbers must have 
bloomed and faded, and who can say what myriads are still to 
bloom ? Witnesses of man’s coming, these flowers will, per- 
chance, witness his passing, and may still expand their modest 
blossoms when man and all his works have been effaced. 
Fred. W. Ashley. 
LYRICS.- 
George Meredith’s lines constantly recurred to us as we read Mr. Benson’s 
“ Lyrics ” : — 
“ With a love exceeding the simple love of the things 
That glide in grasses or rubble of woody wreck. 
Or change their perch on a beat of quivering wings 
From branch to branch, only restful to pipe and peck. 
The good physician Melampus, loving them all. 
Among them walked as a scholar that reads a book.” 
Mr. Benson is by way of being a modern Melampus ; though he has an eye 
for all the quieter beauties of nature, it is her small change, so to speak — the 
sparrows and the newts, the “ red rosetted holly hocks,” and the “ orange-banded 
bees”— that have the most attraction for him. He has watched them and pon- 
dered about them till they have almost taken on humanity in his thought. The 
poem on the woodpecker pleases us the best. It is curious that the nature-poet 
already quoted fixes on the same trait as Mr. Benson, “ Vaffles chuckle on a 
skim,” George Meredith says ; 
“ Laugh, woodpecker, down in the wood ; 
What do you find that moves your mirth?” 
is the very first couplet of Mr. Benson’s poem. 
Most of the other poems are devoted to the country life. Mr. Benson would 
still have us look upon the country as “ a land in which we can always rest,” to 
quote the preface to his first book. Now and then, however, his philosophy fails 
him, and we get such a poem as Matthew' Arnold might have written. 
‘*St. Luke’s .Summer,” again, is in the very manner of Arnold, and in other 
poems we come on traces of “ The Scholar Gipsy,” as in this stanza from “ In the 
Garden ” — 
“ Learn here to be at peace, my soul ; 
A truce to all unkindly fears ; 
The light that shines beyond the goal 
Throws back the shadow of the years.” 
The followers of Arnold among contemporary poets are indeed a “small 
clan henceforward Mr. Benson must be reckoned among them. But the best 
of the verses are those on the “ small deer” of Nature ; in them the poet and 
the naturalist unite, and the result is very charming. Once only does Mr. 
Benson’s felicity of phrase desert him : — 
“ Where on the sandy spit the brooding throng 
Of pensive gulls pipe clear their plaintive hymn. 
Pipe all at once, like nuns at evensong.” 
The compliment here is rather for the gulls than the nuns. The last lime we 
heard the sea-birds “ pipe all at once” Touchstone’s words seemed more fitting 
than Mr. Benson’s — “Truly though there was no great matter in the ditty, yet 
the note was very untuneable.” 
* Lyrics, by Arthur Christopher Benson. 5s. net. The Vale of Arden and 
ether Toems, by Alfred Hayes. 3s. fid. net. (London : John Lane.) 
