Page:Athletics and Manly Sport (1890).djvu/553

18 that are very striking and which prove not the least attractive features of the book. Some of the stories are conceived with unusual power, and are developed with scarcely less effect and and skill."

Boston Times. "Some reminiscences of his romantic life, the poet has woven into the verses that fill this volume. Very grim reminiscences they are, of crime and death and horrors dire; but they represent faithfully, we have no doubt, the society, or rather savagery, of those far and fearsome lands. Most of the poems are stories, sombre in substance, but told with a vehement vigor that is singularly harmonious with their themes. The opening poem, 'The King of the Vasse,' preserves a strange and pathetic legend, which the poet has wrought into a powerful, but most painful story. His imagination revels in pictures of weird desolation and the repulsive and appalling prodigies of animal and vegetable life in the tropic world; and the effect of these presented in quick succession, and varied only by episodes of human sin or suffering, is positively depressing. Such passages as this abound in the poem:—

"'In that strange country's heart, whence comes the breath Of hot disease and pestilential death, Lie leagues of wooded swamp, that from the hills Seem stretching meadows; but the flood that tills These valley basins has the hue of ink And dismal doorways open on the brink, Beneath the gnarled arms of trees that grow All leafless to the top, from roots below The Lethe flood; and he who enters there Beneath this screen sees rising, ghastly bare, Like mammoth bones within a charnel dark, The white and ragged stems of paper-bark. That drip down moisture with a ceaseless drip,— With lines that run like cordage of a ship; For myriad creepers struggle to the light. And twine and meet o'erhead in murderous tight For life and sunshine. . ..