Life — December 19, 1889 — page 6: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

MR. ALDRICH’S “WYNDHAM TOWERS.” T°? have a poem of one thousand lines by Thomas Bailey Al- drich among the holiday books will easily solve the question of a graceful gift for many in that fine minority who believe that a good book is a perpetual symbol of good-fellowship. ‘ Wyndham Towers" (Houghton) is a narrative poem of Elizabethan days told in melodious blank verse—the author's avowed design being “to give his narrative something of the atmosphere and color of the period in which the action takes place, though the story is supposed to be told at a later date.” The tale which is the fabric of this beautiful workmanship in verse-making is on the old theme of the love of two high-born brothers for the same lowly maid. As in “The Master of Ballan- trae,” one brother has all the virtues and the other all the vices: “The one for straightness like a Norland pine Set on some precipice’s perilous edge, Intrepid, handsome, little past blown youth, The other—as glowworm to a star— Suspicious, morbid, passionate, self-involved, The soul half eaten out with solitude, Ti REAT A TRAIN, OO “GRE s Corroded like a sword blade left in sheath, Physician : WHAT 18 YOUR PROFESSION, SIR? Asleep and lost to action.” Patient (pompously): V's A GENTLEMAN, Of course the beautiful maiden loved the young and handsome Physician: WELL, YOU'LL HAVE TO TRY SOMETHING gallant, who was a favorite at Queen Bess’s Court, and the saturnine ELSE; IT DOFSN'T AGREE WITH YoU. knight who lived alone in Wyndham Towers was filled with ——— jealous rage. One fine night when the “stars blinked in the blue” and the brave Darre/! came home to the castle, “singing in high-hearted way, his true love's kiss a memory on his lip,” the enraged Avchard sprang at him from an archway at the stair-top, dealt him a blow with the jeweled hilt of a rapier, carried the lifeless body to one of those secret closets provided in all Eliza- bethan castles, and met his punishment at the hands of Fate, who closed the spring door on dead and living. Mr. Aldrich gives us to understand that the wicked Rychard spent a very bad half-hour before he was suffocated. There is poetic justice in this, and all gentle-born Puritan maidens with the traditions of Calvinistic retri- bution cherished in their hearts can gloat over it while they culti- vate what LIFE calls “the real Christmas spirit.” O look at the poem from another point of view, one finds con- tinual pleasure in its imagery, in the exquisite finish of the lines, in the melody and richness of the phrases. There is a de- scription of dawn in a dozen lines which is among the finest things in the volume: “A chill wind freshened in the pallid East And brought sea smell of newly-blossomed foam, And stirred the leaves and branch-hung nests of birds. Fainter the glowworm’s lantern glimmered now In the marshland and on the forest's hem, And the slow dawn with purple laced the sky Where sky and sea lay sharply edge to edge. The purple melted, changed to violet, Irritable Husband: No, VM BLACKING MY HoOTS, And that to every delicate sea-shell tinge— Fond Wife: MY DEAR, ARE YOU SHAVING? comicbooks.com