Scotsman, 9 April 1894, p. 3

It is not strange, now that a scientific Egyptology has reconstructed the history of the Pharaohs, and that tourists may easily take a holiday in Egypt, to find a sort of poetical companion for the visitor to the land of the Pyramids. Mr H. D. Rawnsley’s book fairly merits this description. “The traveller,” as Mr Rawnsley explains in a prefatory note, “is supposed to see Cairo and the neighbourhood, and then pass up the Nile to the first cataract and Philae.” The sights which he will see are such as to make him wish to be endowed with the gift of poetry that he may give voice to his emotions. This, however, is satisfactorily done for him by Mr Rawnsley. His lyrics speak out the feelings of a stranger who hears the muezzin from the house-top call, who sees the dancing dervishes spin in a holy rapture, who hears the hawkers crying in the streets of Cairo, who looks upon the monuments that form the mouldering skeleton of an empire long dead, or who turns over in his mind the memories of great Egyptians like Totmes III and Queen Hatasu, or stands at sunrise beside the Statute of Memnon. Mr Rawnsley’s poems are always sweet and fluent; and though none of them has the tremendous effect of that poem of Shelley’s on Ozymandias of Egypt which many of them suggest, the grace and sentiment of them will not only please those whose experience enables them to appreciate the local allusions, but will charm perhaps more intimately still the larger number who can visit Egypt only in imagination. The book, for a volume of poetry, is exceptionally erudite, a matter not of the first importance, but not without its value in a work with such a subject as this.

Dublin Daily Express, 13 April 1894, p. 2

Mr Rawnsley has rapidly developed into a voluminous writer. Some few years ago his sole volume of verse consisted of a collection of sonnets on the English Lakes, a book dedicated to the memory of Charles Tennyson Turner, a true poet and a distinguished critic, for he saw in Mr Rawnsley’s verse qualities which made him urge the publication of the poems which he never lived to read when issued in collected form. Since that little volume saw the light, its author has written some very spirited ballads, of which the subject is chiefly connected with the sea or coastline. These were printed from time to time in “Macmillan’s Magazine” and now form a volume in themselves. Besides these, Mr Rawnsley has written “Poems, Ballads, and Bucolics,” “Valete: Tennyson and other Memorial Poems,” and prose notes on Edward Thring and on the Nile, and he has contributed a chapter to “Wordsworthiana,” and his “Literary Associations of the Lake District” is shortly to appear. This is quite a formidable list, even exclusive of the book before us. The Nile has long ere this been celebrated in song—Leigh Hunt’s and Shelley’s sonnets produced in friendly rivalry are not very happy specimens of the manner in which such a subject might be treated, and they are, perhaps, the most important instances in which the ancient river is named in English poetry. Mr Rawnsley has dwelt with evident pleasure on every aspect of the subject, and the result is very gratifying. The theme is handled with genuine poetic feeling, and though the poems are arranged with a view to locality rather than to subject they form no mere Baedeker in verse, but a book which contains some delightful renderings of the mystery and melancholy interest which is attached to everything Egyptian. When one reads Mr. Rawnsley’s poem on the “First Call to Prayer” one hears with the poet the evening hymns—

Now high, now low, the cadence falls,
    Music of streams and summer-rhymes
    Of bees that murmur in the limes,
And far-off Alpine cattle-calls,
Seem blent with bells and silver chimes,
    In mellow mystery of sound
    That floats where mountains stand around,
From cities glad at festal times.

All that attracts the attention, gladdens the heart, or touches the imagination of travellers to Egypt has been touched on by the poet: he misses nothing. The legends and myths of this land of mystery are finely dealt with, and his workmanship is at all times worthy of his subject. The landscape is painted with a sure and truthful hand; it is always glowing with the burning brightness of the sun at noon. The contents of the book may be gathered from such titles as “Street Cries,” “The Obelisk at Heliopolis,” “Morning Mist on the Great Pyramid,” “The Mummy of Sesostris.” As a specimen of the verse we cannot do better than to give the opening sonnet entitled “A Return to Egypt.”

There is a land where Time no count can keep,
    Where works of men imperishable seem,
    Where through Death’s barren solitude doth gleam
Undying hope for them that sow and reap;
Yea, land of life, where death is but a deep
    Warm slumber, a communicable dream,
    Where from the silent grave far voices stream
If those that tell their secrets in their sleep.

Land of the palm-tree and the pyramid,
    Land of sweet waters from a mystic urn,
        Land of sure rest, where suns shine on for ever,
I left thee—in thy sands a heart was hid;
        My life, my love, were cast upon thy river,
    And, lo! to seek Osiris I return.

Sketch, 6 June 1894, p. 43

Idylls and Lyrics of the Nile is a kind of poetic itinerary, which does not prevent it from being also a book of poetry. All, save travellers, will ignore the fact that the poems are arranged rather with regard to locality than to subject, and dip and dig at random. The really good verse, though it is picturesque, has to be dug for; but it is worth a reader’s pains, for there are passages full of fine colour and melancholy fascination. In the three water-carrier poems, “Hope,” “Joy,” and “Sorrow,” will be found exquisite pictures of Egyptian domestic life, especially in the first—

Shway-shwáyah, with her lips all blue,
And chin dark-beaded with tattoo,
Takes the large water-jar in hand
And joins the river-going band.

She has reached the maturity of her fourteenth year—

And if full charged her head can bear
From the far Nile the large ‘bellas,’
She unto marriage she may pass.

In the “Joy” poem the ambition is accomplished. “Sweet Habeebeh”

l        aughs, she is a bride, those finger-tips
So red with henna tell she has a home,
And lord.

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Scotsman, 9 December 1890, p. 6

HDR’s volume will be read with interest by lovers of poetry in general, and with a particular delight by those who know the scenes and characters that are to be met with in the rural parts of Lincolnshire. Most of the pieces in the book draw their subject from the fen country. Those which do not are ballads or odes founded upon heroic actions done in quite recent times. These are celebrated in a stately line, which, however, is usually too coldly dignified to have much life. On the other hand, the pieces in the Lincolnshire dialect are lively both in theme and treatment. They naturally suggest a comparison with the Laureate’s poems in the same dialect. Some notion of their quality may be conveyed when it is said that they bear the comparison without disparagement to themselves.

Stamford Mercury, 2 January 1891, p. 7

This is a collection of poems by the Vicar of Crosthwaite, Keswick, Cumberland, some of which have already appeared in contemporary periodicals. The ballads for the most part record heroic deeds done in Great Britain and America during the past few years. The bucolics are sketches from real life in Lincolnshire in the language made familiar by the Poet Laureate. There are alterations, however, in the diction which Mr Rawnsley explains are due to the change which has taken place in the dialect during the last fifty years. The dialect and folk-lore, he further reminds his readers, is that of the old Danish colony, whose children live between Horncastle, Louth, and Boston. Many of the poems are of considerable merit, and that portion in the Lincolnshire dialect will be read with interest in these parts of the country where it prevails.

Pall Mall Gazette, 27 August 1891, p. 3

The Vicar of Crosthwaite has long been as well known for his industry in verse as for the village industries and other good works inspired by him in his own parish. He has written sonnets on the English lakes and on other picturesque subjects, and on almost every imaginable public event of any note during recent years, and he proves himself equally contemporary in these ballads and bucolics. Since “Poet” Close died, he might be called the last of the Lake poets, if the last but one has not for ever spoilt that title; and the present book shows that he accepts in full those theories of the poetic uses of common life and common speech which Wordsworth and the so-called Lake poets maintained so vigorously. His prose preface states very invitingly his subject-matter: “The ballads, for the most part, record heroic deeds done in Great Britain and America during the past few years. The bucolics are sketches from real life In Lincolnshire.” Further, he explains of these rustic pieces that their dialect, “made familiar by the Poet Laureate, is that of the old Danish colony whose children live between Horncastle, Louth, and Boston.” His preface in verse sounds still more inviting:--

Here are ballads! who will buy?
Not on dainty shelves to lie,
But for pockets plain enough,
Honest homespun in the rough;
Fit for lord of labourer’s hand,
Up in rocky Cumberland,
Fit for villager and squire,
Down in breezy Lincolnshire;

Unfortunately, the bucolics are written in the most uncompromising of Doric dialects, and not according to its idiom and spirit only, which might be tolerable, but to its very letter, which only a genius like Tennyson’s can make poetically effective. The reader, remembering his Burns and his Barnes, who turns eagerly enough to what is promised him here, is likely to feel a little dismayed accordingly when, in the first verse of the first bucolic—“Grand-dad’s Annie,”—he encounters a line like the following”—

So gev’ hoäver to meä, and grawing ay sich pääce!

It is true that read in the rough, so to speak, these Lincolnshire pieces may be understood with a little conning, and found to be often worth the understanding; but the interest they have is philological first, and matter-of-fact second, and only poetical, third and last, if at all. It should be added, however, that they often possess humour, which is a rare thing, as we know, in even great poets; while sometimes, in seeking an effect of humour or pathos, they become merely banale, as in “A Sad Letter”:--

He will not keeäp, his corp’s that bad,
     We bury ’im at threea to-morrow

In other pieces there are touches of native humour which redeem what is prosaic in them. In the “Fox and Hound”, which is a temperance philippic, taking for subject a village inn, one finds and remembers, amid much that is not inspired, one or two admirable touches. For example:--

Theer’s a shackulty noise in carts when carts is droonk—
     Tha can tell.

In the main, though, these bucolics impress the reader as not poetical, but prosaic. Told in prose they might be made into most striking folk-sketches, in rhyme they only fail of their effect.

Turning to the heroic ballad of the book, one is not more convinced. Mr. Rawnsley has a stirring perception of the great heroic situations in contemporary life, and he turns them into ballads with a rare facility, but not, alas! with sufficient force or finesse of style. As it is, indeed, he affords the reader, very unwisely, the means of testing his success by appending to many of these ballads the prose reports upon which they are based. It says a great deal for contemporary journalism that these reports, taken in some cases from the newspapers, are often really poetical, much more so than the ballads which here embody them. In “A Woman Saviour” Mr. Rawnsley takes a report from the New York Tribune of a woman who saved a train, the White Mountain Express, at North Wakefield, in August 1890, a report concise, dramatic, poetic indeed; and it is instructive to find how its brief picturesque touches fail in their versified and expanded form, though that has a certain stirring effect of its own. Similarly Mr. Rawnsley writes of the Johnstown disaster, of Father Damien, od Sister Rose Gertrude, and other subjects of the kind: and always with fine feeling and rhetorical effect, but never quite convincingly, with the finer breath that can make such things live in our ears and our hearts. Like Mr Alfred Austin, Mr Lewis Morris, and other contemporary verse-writers of some reputation, who would keep up the great traditions of English poetry, he has all the inclination and industry need for the task, but he has not the genius, alack! If he had, Mr Rawnsley might be also that Poet Laureate of the newspaper which he aims to be, but which is a kind of thing, unfortunately, born and not made.

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Glasgow Evening Post, 27 April 1893, p. 7

Consists of some remarkably well-turned verses, with more than a trace pf poetry in their composition.

Ardrossan and Saltcoats Herald, 19 May 1893, p. 2

The author of this admirable volume, the Vicar of Crosthwaite, Keswick, was an intimate friend of the late Laureate, being amongst those who had the signal honour of pall-bearer when the dead poet was borne through Westminster. Indeed, it was the father of Mr. Rawnsley who performed the ceremony of Tennyson’s marriage; but while this fact alone is sufficient to account for the friendship between the author of “Valete” and the great Laureate, it is interesting to know also that Tennyson had a sincere admiration for the Keswick muse. Nor is that opinion due to mere bias of friendship, for Mr. Rawnsley’s poetic gift has obtained considerable recognition in many quarters, and that very justly. His work is always full of fine feeling, chastened thought, and graceful expression. Hitherto in his “Sonnets at the English Lakes,” and “Sonnets Round the Coast,” Mr Rawnsley has been a worthy representative of the Lake school of Nature-poets. In his Poems, Ballads, and Bucolics he was more general in his themes, and his ballad, “The Village Carpenter,” is marked by moving dramatic pathos. The present volume is entirely memorial of persons, the memory of whom the world will not willingly let die. Of the great title name, Mr Rawnsley has indubitably written well and beautifully in a poem of some thirty-four stanzas, which breathe a fervent admiration for the Laureate’s character, and a sympathetic knowledge of the main burden of his verse.

The moonlight lay with glory on his face
    About whose bed in grief the nation bowed,
    And darkly flew the wild October cloud:
Sobbed the pale morn, and came with faltering pace
    As if it feared to lift a dead man’s shroud;
    And all the streams made lamentation loud.

But such majestic calm was in his look
    As seemed to say, ‘Why weeping o’er me bend,
    Or bid me longer here on earth attend
Whose home is Heaven?’ His hand held Shake-
         speare’s book—
    Shakespeare, so soon to greet him as a friend!
    And so he went companioned, to the end.

                         . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

He was true patriot, and his soul was set
    To give our England flowers of song for weeds.
    He planted well, he scattered fruitful seeds;
He showed us love was more than coronet,
    And in the jarring of a hundred creeds
    Taught life and truth were hid in noble deeds.

Yet most that purest passion for a maid
    And manly love with maiden virtue crowned,
    Availed to keep our social fabric sound;
And loving Arthur well, he well pourtrayed
    That kingliest Arthur of the Table Round,
    Who entered Heaven to heal him of Earth’s wound.

And he has entered Heaven by earth unharmed;
    Years could not blanch a single lock with grey,
    Time could not steal a single bolt away,
Nor blunt the sword wherewith his soul was armed:
    But from this shore, whereon he might not stay,
    His music nevermore shall die away.

Here are some glimpses through a window into the poet’s home:--

And when the birds have sought their ilex home,
    And the magnolia pours its fragrance rare,
    We shall not mount again his turret stair
And hear the strong deep-chested music come,
    While light in hand within his simple chair
    He summoned sound to people all the air,

And set the rafters ringing to the wail
    Of a great nation for its warrior dead,
    The boom of cannon and the mourner’s tread;
Or bade the bugle’s elfin echoes fail,
    The long low lights on castle walls be shed—
    Then shut the book in dream, and bowed his head.

Nor ever after meat when lamps are lit,
    About the shining table drawing nigher,
    Feel the fine soul that flashed forth at desire;
Sharp sallies, rapier-thrusts of genial wit
    That called for friend, and bade the foe retire,
    And filled the hall with laughter, and with fire.

Mr Rawnsley supplies some more interesting reminiscences in the notes at the end of the volume. One could wish that he might give us a series of these in a separate sketch, though one cannot but admire the loyalty which in his reserve he shows to the relict family of the Laureate, by whom a life of Lord Tennyson is now in preparation.

Passing to the other memorial verses, one is impressed by the catholicity of Mr Rawnsley’s bead-roll of royal dead, heroes, leaders, shepherds, singers, and thinkers among men. Names so diverse as Newman and Spurgeon, Kingsley and Bonar, M. Arnold and Whitman, Liddon and Renan, Mozart and Jenny Lind, appear.

Mr Rawnsley’s interest extends to music as a sister art, and his treatment of Mozart is a good example of his sonnet form—a measure which prevails throughout the volume:--

God called whom for too short a time he gave,
        Dust back to dust, snapped string and broke
        the shell,
    And as they bore him towards the tolling bell
Of old St. Marx, no hands were there to wave
Adieu, no mourners but the winds that rave,
    The tears shed for him were the rains that fell,
    But all the hearts that ever felt his spell
Stand bowed to-day beside that pauper grave.

Mozart, thy soul, familiar grown with Death
    Long since, laid willing touch upon the door
        That opened to the land where sorrows cease,
    And leaving here on earth th’ unfinished score
Went onward, singing, with an angel’s breath,
    The requiem music of eternal peace.

Mr Rawnsley’s devotion to the shrine of Tennyson does not prevent him from a loyal admiration for the poet’s contemporary, who, according to a not infrequent estimate, was even a greater poet:--

Browning is dead at Venice! dark and slow
        The gondoliers move silently along,
    Wan Adria’s sea sobs sorrowful among
Drear halls, and pale for grief sits Asolo.
Browning is dead! the voice tolls to and fro
    And hushes all his latest tender song,
    As in an organ when the deep notes throng
To drown the quavering treble’s passionate flow.

Browning is dead! with Florence on his heart
    Writ large; but larger, England underneath—
        The England of his helping; for he knew
    The mind where Freedom is, and, to the death,
For souls in pain who dare the Angel part,
        Onset and victory his brave trumpet blew.

The letter from Browning to Tennyson printed in the notes is worth quoting:--

29 De Vere Gardens, W., August 5, 1889              

    My dear Tennyson,--To-morrow is your birthday—indeed, a memorable one. Let me say I associate myself with the universal pride of our country in your glory, and in its hope that for many and many a year we may have your very self among us—secure that your poetry will be a wonder and delight to all those appointed to come after. An for my own part, let me further say, I have loved you dearly. May God bless you and yours.
    At no moment from first to last of my acquaintance with your works, or friendship with yourself, have I had an other feeling, expressed or kept silent, than this which an opportunity allows me to utter—that I am, and ever shall be, my dear Tennyson, admiringly and affectionately yours,

Robert Browning               

Several of the last sonnets are upon “Friends and Neighbours,” and we have heard, in the course of casual conversations with Keswickians, that the feeling tributes paid by the Vicar’s muse on the death of residenters are warmly appreciated. A concluding hymn gives us a hint of Mr Rawnsley’s capacities for the rare art of hymn-writing. Here is a specimen:--

Let the funeral bell be tolled
    Not too sadly: she is bride—
Bride of Death—but we, who hold
    Our dark vigil here, outside,
Know the Master of the Feast
Has received her for His guest.

Though beside the Bratha’s stream
    In the stream of death we stand,
These dark waters inly seem
    To divide us from the land
Where we all would gathered be,
Happy angel-soul, with thee.

Given noble themes and fitting measures, and you have good poetry. In these days when so much in poetic art runs, as Mr. John Morley says, to mere drapery, it is a satisfaction to find things written about that are worth the vehicle. Mr. Rawnsley’s themes are worthy, and his command of forms is melodious and versatile. Of course this is no magnum opus, and seeing that the author so little lacks in the accomplishment of verse, we are led to wish that he would project some more sustained work. Mr. Ruskin thinks the world has, on the whole, rather too much good poetry. This applies to poetry which is merely good. Of poetry of the very highest we can never have too much. We should be grateful to the author of “Valete”—we shall be more son when he renders less true his own stanza:--

But we are left disconsolate; no lyres
    To sound a people’s glory, soothe its pain,
    No trumpet-call to chivalry again,
No words of subtlest feeling, finest fire
    To keep us still a nation, and no strain
    To bring new knowledge to a wiser reign.

St. James’s Gazette, 5 June 1893, p. 5

A volume of exceedingly dignified and beautiful verse is published by Mr. H. D. Rawnsley under the title of “Valete”. It consists of entirely Memorial Poems: the subject is a funereal one, but Mr. Rawnsley’s volume, when one accepts the subject, is not unworthy of it. First comes an elaborate threnody on the death of Tennyson, to which are attached various Sonnets dealing with incidents and aspects of the poet’s life. The rest of the volume divides itself into Sonnets on Royalties, “Heroes among Men,” “Leaders of Men,” “Shepherds of Men,” “Singers,” “Thinkers,” “Friends and Neighbours.” It will be allowed that this collection of more than a hundred sonnets on one sad theme shows considerable facility in that form of verse. Yet the writer has sufficient art to make even a long reading of these poems possible without long weariness. One feels, however, that this is Mr. Rawnsley’s finished verse; it is excellent in its way, but he is hardly likely to do anything better.

Pall Mall Gazette, 19 June 1893, p. 4

Snatches of Son.—If ever metrical biographies of celebrities come into fashion Mr Rawnsley will rise to fame as a quick and competent compiler of rhymed obituary notices. He has been practicing the art for nearly twenty years, and with sufficient success to win a place in several magazines and journals of repute. It would seem to be as natural to him to sit down and pen a funeral ode or sonnet as it is for the “One Who Knew Him” to throw off at a few hours’ notice the requisite column of reminiscence of the recently dead. Not too much is to be expected of poetry produced under such conditions. It is to the classic dirges of the language as the undertaker’s wreath of immortelles is to the garland of fresh flowers laid lovingly in the tomb by some dear friend or kinsman. A mourner whose sympathies extend from the Poet Laureate down to a chairman of the Liverpool Stock Exchange discounts beforehand his reputation for deep feeling. There are more than one hundred farewell poems collected in the volume, which Mr Rawnsley has styled “Valete”: and nearly all of them smack of the cemetery. He shows himself a conscientious observer of the technical forms of his art, and a fluent producer of lines which were best in place in a gravedigger’s Gradus ad Parnassum. But he is uniformly depressing. Epitaphs are tolerable at intervals, but a volume of them is to the taste of but few among the living. Atque in perpetuum frater ave atque vale is the kindest criticism possible of the author of “Valete”.

St. James’s Gazette, 19 September 1893, p. 5

[Valete].—The Rev. H. D. Rawnsley’s Muse is a pensive creature occupied mainly with the contemplation of death and the reflections appropriate thereto. “Valete” is a sort of neatly-kept and lovingly-tended cemetery, in which each tombstone has a poetic epitaph in sonnet form. Most of the silent tenants of this God’s acre bear distinguished names . . . but sometimes we find an obscurer grave, over which the poet has written by no means his least touching words. The lines on “Alice” seem to us as graceful and sincere as anything in the book:--

Her life was as a missal, year by year
         Writ in red letters of self-sacrifice,
    Illumined quaintly for the children’s eyes,
Plain to be read, and musical to hear.
A tale of life so generous, so sincere,
    That angels stooped to listen with surprise,
    And, for such books are scarce in Paradise,
Bade Death go close it—so they brought it there.

Between the golden chapters week by week,
    And ’twixt the lines in ink invisible,
        She, skilled in all the arts, but most in this,
Had penned a language only angels speak,
    And when their fuller sunlight on it fell,
        These words leapt forth in answer—“I am His.”

The “conceit” of the red missal, the invisible ink, and the “fuller sunlight” seems to us very pretty and quaint, and not too ingeniously laboured. But we doubt whether Mr Rawnsley was well advised to collect all his memorial verses in one volume. The effect of reading them is to make one feel at times that they are the work of a professional writer of obituary notices. Yet there is always a certain quiet dignity and refinement about his verse—and these qualities are sufficiently rare nowadays.

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Scotsman, 14 March 1887, p. 4

A writer who, apparently, visits all the places of interest along the English coast and makes his tours the excuse for a series of sonnets, must not grumble if readers are reminded of the humorous criticism made by the authors of “Rejected Addresses” upon Sir W. Scott’s “Rokeby”—that the poet was journeying by easy stages to London, and intended to “do” all the gentlemen’s houses by the way. Mr. H. D. Rawnsley, however, in his Sonnets Round the Coast shows a true poetic spirit, which would make a seemingly formal travel in search of the poetic almost excusable. His sonnets are of a high order, and he frequently invests antiquarian relics with an interest which future tourists, with his verses in their hands, will readily appreciate. Mr Rawnsley takes his readers over the Isle of Wight, where, of course, he turns to Lord Tennyson with some well-finished complimentary lines. Thence he journeys along the Cornish coast, Bristol Channel, by Barmouth, Dolgelly, and Cardigan, to Lancashire and Cumberland. Then a flight is made to the North-East coast; and Mr Rawnsley gives us two fine sonnets on George Wishart and the late Principal Shairp. Hogg, the Ettrick Shepherd, is noted—

No more on Hawkshaw Rig the shepherd’s son
Waves, to the murmur of melodious streams,
What tales he learned beside his mother’s knee,
But somewhere on a lily-blossomed lea,
He leads the pure Kilmeny gently on,
And finds another friend to share his dreams.

The late Principal Tulloch is also apostrophised in lines of great beauty, as the following specimen will show—

And if before thine ears were stopped by Death
No message came of that last battle-cry,
Where friends fought fierce with argument for swords,
Thou knowest now, from out men’s cloudy breath
And strife of indistinguishable words,
God rolls his car of Truth to Victory.

There is no need to follow Mr Rawnsley along the Northumberland, Yorkshire, and Lincolnshire coasts; enough has been said to indicate that his volume possesses very great merit, which should render it widely acceptable.

Hampshire Advertiser, 19 March 1887, p. 7

Sonnets Round the Coast.—In this delightful little book Mr Rawnsley has shown that he is an appreciative observer of the beauty of our coasts, the main features of which he fixes in the mind, by brief, telling, descriptions. There is a conciseness in his lines, and a charm of expression which will secure for these sonnets, we think, a favourable reception. They may be compared to exquisite cabinet pictures of coast scenery. We only wish he had devoted a few more sonnets to the Solent and South-Western Coasts. Between the Needles and Portland there are several beautiful spots that might have been dilated upon.

Globe, 29 April 1887, p. 1

Vacancy for a Poet.—“Must be able to put together at least four different rhymes, and to finger out correctly the decasyllabic metre. Character immaterial, provided applicant has a good command of adjectives. Alliteration not objected to.” Anyone complying with conditions above advertised has a fine opening before him. Mr. H. D. Rawnsley, sonneteer-in-ordinary to the Lake District, has recently given to the world 200 odd “Sonnets Round the Coast,” –beginning from Farringford, and working round westward as far as Spilsby. One advantage of this branch of sonneteering is that it can be done from a fishing-smack or a private steam-launch, and, if the sea be choppy, certain influences are created decidedly favourable to poetry—all the best verses having about them a decided flavour of sickness, disease, or, best of all, impending dissolution. But the marvel of the matter is that Mr Rawnsley has left untouched some of the most poetical of our shores—all that part, in fact, which from Deal to Ramsgate runs, with a handsome margin on either side. Will nobody now come forward to crown with laurel the White Cliffs of Dover, to lay a wreath of verse upon the pebbles of Margate, to sing of bathing machines and bath chairs, of the pier, the castle upon the sand, and the local minstrels? Is nobody capable of rising in verse to the heights – or rather, we should say, to the sandy slopes – attained in a sister art by Mr. Frith, R.A.?

Birmingham Daily Post, 29 April 1887, p. 7

Sonnets Round the Coast—“Be bold, be bold,” is good advice; but the sequent caution is not to be disregarded, “Be not overbold.” A volume of sonnets is almost too much of a good thing. A dainty, delicate, gem-like thing is a perfect sonnet, bet even the greatest masters’ happy efforts are almost to be counted on the fingers, and one reads one or two and lays the treasured volume aside. To produce some hundreds of sonnets that shall be readable as a volume almost passes the wit of man, and when in this inherent difficulty the adventurer gives them a topographical turn and “does” the coast of England, writing sonnets on every point of observation, it is impossible to avoid much sameness in thought and expression. The sonnets are correct in form, they are often happy, and the writer has been more successful than we should have thought possible in varying the note. The book, typographically a very pretty and attractive one, will repay an occasional dip into it, though we should have recommended it with more confidence if it had been less monotonous. We subjoin a specimen:

     Bamborough Castle

High on its rock the ruddy castle glowed,
   Like some huge monster, crawled from out
      the seas,
The isles of Farne, Northumbria’s Cyclades,
Broke the blue tide that toward the fortress flowed;
Thither his forty keels bold Ida rowed,
There Aidan bent the saintliest of knees,
And Oswald’s hand, that heard the beggar’s pleas
And could not taste corruption, alms bestowed.
No saints seek refuge now, no warriors come,
Thy use is gone, thou tower-encircled steep—
But like the spring of Bebban’s basalt well
Thou dost renew thy strength; thy citadel
Is garrisoned with girls who learn to keep
By arts of peace the inviolable home.

Illustrated London News, 14 May 1887, p. 26

Sonnets Round the Coast—Here is another true British poet, the Vicar of Crosthwaite, Keswick; he is a personal friend of Lord Tennyson, and of his brother, the late rev. Charles Tennyson Turner, whose disciple he has been in the exquisite art of composing that peculiar jewel of versifiers, the perfect sonnet, which is most fit for idyllic contemplations. Mr Rawnsley has been yachting along the shores of the Isle of Wight, and from Portland to Weymouth to Plymouth—we wish he had seen more of Devonshire—thence all round Cornwall, and up the Bristol Channel. He has visited Barmouth, he is quite at home on the North Lancashire and Cumberland coasts. On the eastern seaboard he is familiar with St. Andrews, with the coast of Northumberland, and with those of Yorkshire and Lincolnshire. So are many English people: but here is one who can write, upon so many places, above two hundred thoughtful and beautiful little poems, each of the regular fourteen lines, without a fault or flaw in their prescribed metrical structure; and who never fails to express a clear idea, or a noble sentiment, in pure, strong, and unaffected language. Opening his little volume at random, a very good sonnet is found on every page; and it is frequently such as the reader at once feels to be precisely what ought to be the meditation of a good Englishman, acquainted with the past history of his native land, who visits those particular places of its shores. Mr Rawnsley makes fine poetry of Skegness, Boston Church tower, and the Lincolnshire fens.

Graphic, 28 May 1887, p. 4

Sonnets Round the Coast—It must be frankly confessed that a volume consisting entirely of modern sonnets of the ordinary type is apt to be rather wearisome reading; still there is a certain amount of pleasure to be derived from “Sonnets Round the Coast.” . . . The pieces are fairly good of their kind, and treat of natural scenery and legendary matter in an interesting style. Judging from the notes, the author has no very high opinion of his readers’ probable fund of ordinary knowledge.

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