er, that we are sufficiently cultivated and experienced
in literature to possess ready apprehension of a thought, a fair taste
in expression, and an ear for cadence and melody, there is, I believe,
but one certain way of telling whether a verse-writer is a poet at all,
and then whether as poet he is greater or less.

He must be read a first time without effort at criticism of any kind.
The words and rhythms, the thoughts and feelings contained in a
particular poem will thus leave a certain general effect, an unanalysed
impression. It will be as it is with the true judge of art when he
stands before a picture, a statue, or a building. In its presence he
either feels the spontaneous delight which comes of a general
satisfyingness, or he feels the annoyance of a general unsatisfyingness,
or he feels neither one nor the other. So with a poem. We shall either
feel that the sounds and melodies have bathed us in delight, or we shall
think them harsh, or we shall think nothing about them at all. We shall
feel a high intellectual stimulation or a strong emotional excitement,
or we shall think the passage rather futile, or we shall be aware of no
pronounced feeling one way or the other. If we are constrained to say to
ourselves, "What a noble passage!" "What splendid verse!" "What a sweet
song!" or to use any of those unstudied exclamations which spring to the
lips before we have had time or inclination to realize our impressions
more definitely--then, I maintain, we are justified in calling the
writer at once and definitively a poet. Whether he is a greater poet or
a minor poet remains still to be estimated, but poet he is, be he Burns
or Swinburne, Tennyson or Watson or Davidson. Here, for instance, is a
passage from Watson's elegy upon Tennyson, which he has called _Lachrymae
Musarum_. I do not choose it because it is his best, but because it is
typical:--

He hath returned to regions whence he came;
Him doth the spirit divine
Of universal loveliness reclaim,
All nature is his shrine.
Seek him henceforward in the wind and sea,
In earth's and air's emotion or repose,
In every star's august serenity,
And in the rapture of the flaming rose.
There seek him if ye would not seek in vain,
There, in the rhythm and music of the whole,
Yea, and for ever in the human soul
Made stronger and more beauteous by his strain.

For lo! Creation's self is one great choir,
And what is Nature's order but the rhyme