“Nineveh, and Other Poems.” By George Sylvester Viereck. Moffat, Yard & Co., New York. There is real poetical genius in the author. The sad thing is that it has been put to so depraved a use. The chief poem is New York presented as Nineveh in all her wild wickedness, but the very wickedness in which the author has seemed to revel has debased his own morals, and recalls a stanza from Whittier— “For whoso strives with wrong may find
Its touch pollute, its darkness blind!” The author seems not so much to have striven with wrong as to have joined its ranks, “heel and wimple.” One stanza of his poem on the modern Nineveh is— “Sit not too proudly on thy throne;
Think on thy sisters, them that fell;
Not all the host of Babylon
Could save thee from the jaws of hell.” It is a sad thing that the gift of poesy should be used for so base a purpose.