Reviews

R561129A.  The Keepsake (1857).

The Athenæum, 29 November 1856, p. 1461.

As reprinted in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 23, 406–407.

This veteran annual wears well, and boasts still the same clear, hard type, the same sandwiches of prose and verse, and the same glowing beauties as it did twenty years ago. The illustrations, chiefly portraits, are by Messrs. Desanges, Corbould, Naish, Gush, Solomon, Dukes, and Dicksee. Among the literary contributors, we find the names of Messrs. Swain, Watts, and Chorley. Mrs. Browning has some playful verses, with not much in them, and Mr. Browning a short poem, with a few fine touches in it, which should not be lost.—

May and Death.

I wish that when you died last May,

Charles, there had died along with you

Three parts of Spring’s delightful things;

Ay, and for me, the fourth part too.

A foolish thought, and worse, perhaps!

There must be many a pair of friends

Who, arm in arm, deserve the warm

Moon’s birth and the long evening-ends.

So, for their sake, prove May still May!

Let their new time, like mine of old,

Do all it did for me; I bid

Sweet slights and sounds throng manifold.

Only, one little sight, one plant

Woods have in May, that starts up green

Except a streak, which, so to speak,

Is Spring’s blood, split its leaves between,—

That, they might spare: a certain wood

Might lose the plant; their loss were small:

And I,—whene’er the plant is there

Its drop comes from my heart, that’s all.

[George Walter Thornbury]

Reviewed:

The Keepsake, ed. Margaret Power, London: 1857.

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