Mr. Scollard is almost wholly an objective poet, and by method a painter. His palette is ever ready for the picture furnished him at every turn, and hence his several volumes relating to the Orient, _Lutes of Morn_, _Lyrics of the Dawn_, _Songs of Sunrise Lands_, etc., are perhaps truer standards by which to measure his work than any other, illustrating as they do the pictorial side of his talent. Every object in the Orient is a picture with its individual color and atmosphere, but Mr. Scollard does not merely offer us a sketch in color; the outwardly picturesque is made to interpret a phase of life, and the spiritual contrasts in this land—where one religion or philosophy succeeds another, bringing with it another civilization and leaving desolate the ancient shrines—are indicated with vivid phrase, as in these lines:
A turbaned guard keeps stolid ward by the Zion gate in the sun, And the Paynim bows his shaven brows at the shrine of Solomon; At the chosen altars, long, long quenched is the flame of the sacred fire, And the jackal has his haunt in the tomb of Hiram, King of Tyre.
Great Herod’s pride with its columned aisles is grown with the olive bough, And Gath and Dan are but crumbling piles, while Gaza is gateless now; The sea on the sands of Ascalon sets hands to a mournful lyre, And the jackal has his haunt in the tomb of Hiram, King of Tyre.
The closing stanza draws the contrast, or rather makes the spiritual application of the poem by which “the starry fame of one holy name”
Has blazoned Bethlehem for aye the heart of the world’s desire, While the jackal has his haunt in the tomb of Hiram, King of Tyre.
The final line of these stanzas may offer a metrical stumbling-block until one catches the sweep of the rhythm and falls in note with the cæsural pause after the word “tomb.” Mr. Scollard is nothing if not lyrical, and it would be easier for the traditional camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a captious critic to discover a metrical falsity in his tuneful song.
But to return to the Orient, not alone the reverence for the Christian faith speaks in these poems, but the artistic beauty in the Moslem and other faiths has entered into them; one is stirred to sympathetic devotion by these lines,—