ent into
one methodical music so perfectly that at times the notes seem almost
simple. Sounding almost all the harmonies of the modern lyre, he has,
perhaps as a matter of course, some of the faults also, the "spasmodic"
and other lapses, which from age to age, in successive changes of
taste, have been the "defects" of excellent good "qualities." He is
certainly not the--

Pathetic singer, with no strength to sing,

as he says of the white-throat on the tulip-tree,

Whose leaves unfinished ape her faulty song.

In effect, a large compass of beautiful thought and expression, from
poetry old and new, have become to him matter malleable anew for a
further and finer reach of literary art. And with the perfect grace of
an intaglio, he shows, as in truth the minute intaglio may do, the
faculty of structure, the logic of poetry. "The New Endymion" is a
good instance of such sustained [113] power. Poetic scholar!--If we
must reserve the sacred name of "poet" to a very small number, that
humbler but perhaps still rarer title is due indisputably to Mr. Gosse.
His work is like exquisite modern Latin verse, into the academic shape
of which, discreet and coy, comes a sincere, deeply felt consciousness
of modern life, of the modern world as it is. His poetry, according
with the best intellectual instincts of our critical age, is as pointed
out recently by a clever writer in the Nineteenth Century, itself a
kind of exquisite, finally revised criticism.

Not that he fails in originality; only, the graces, inborn certainly,
but so carefully educated, strike one more. The sense of his
originality comes to one as but an after-thought; and certainly one
sign of his vocation is that he has made no conscious effort to be
original. In his beautiful opening poem of the "White-throat," giving
his book its key-note, he seems, indeed, to accept that position,
reasons on and justifies it. Yet there is a clear note of originality
(so it seems to us) in the peculiar charm of his strictly personal
compositions; and, generally, in such touches as he gives us of the
soul, the life, of the [114] nineteenth century. Far greater, we
think, than the charm of poems strictly classic in interest, such as
the "Praise of Dionysus," exquisite as that is, is the charm of those
pieces in which, so to speak, he transforms, by a kind of
colour-change, classic forms and associations into those--say! of
Thames-side--pieces which, though in manner o