th aching wounds and torturing thirst,
What charm in canvas shot with light,
And pale with faces cleft and curst,
Past life and life's delight?

And then Mr. Gosse's purely descriptive power, his aptitude for
still-life and landscape, is unmistakably vivid and sound. Take, for
an instance, this description of high-northern summer:--

The ice-white mountains clustered all around us,
But arctic summer blossomed at our feet;
The perfume of the creeping sallows found us,
The cranberry-flowers were sweet.

Below us through the valley crept a river,
Cleft round an island where the Lap-men lay;
Its sluggish water dragged with slow endeavour
The mountain snows away.

There is no night-time in the northern summer,
But golden shimmer fills the hours of sleep,
And sunset fades not, till the bright new-comer,
Red sunrise, smites the deep.

But when the blue snow-shadows grew intenser
Across the peaks against the golden sky,
And on the hills the knots of deer grew denser,
And raised their tender cry,

[111]

And wandered downward to the Lap-men's dwelling,
We knew our long sweet day was nearly spent,
And slowly, with our hearts within us swelling,
Our homeward steps we bent.

"Sunshine before Sunrise!" There's a novelty in that, for poetic use
at least, so far as we know, though we remember one fine paragraph
about it in Sartor Resartus. The grim poetic sage of Chelsea, however,
had never seen what he describes: not so Mr. Gosse, whose acquaintance
with northern lands and northern literature is special. We have indeed
picked out those stanzas from a quiet personal record of certain
amorous hours of early youth in that quaint arctic land, Mr. Gosse's
description of which, like his pretty poem on Luebeck, made one think
that what the accomplished group of poets to which he belongs requires
is, above all, novelty of motive, of subject.

He takes, indeed, the old themes, and manages them better than their
old masters, with more delicate cadences, more delicate transitions of
thought, through long dwelling on earlier practice. He seems to
possess complete command of the technique of poetry--every form of what
may be called skill of hand in it; and what marks in [112] him the
final achievement of poetic scholarship is the perfect balance his work
presents of so many and varied effects, as regards both matter and
form. The memories of a large range of poetic reading are bl