* * * * *

Now it is night, and--

The wind steals down the lawns
With a whisper of ecstasy,
Of moonlit nights and rosy dawns,
And a nest in a hawthorn tree;
Of the little mate for whom I wait,
Flying across the sea,
Through storm and night as sure as fate,
Swift-winged with love for me.

And again I ask, has there, at first sight, been anything more like
Shelley since Shelley's _Cloud_?

Assuming that the first step in our method has left us quite satisfied
that a writer (and here I leave Mr. Watson and Mr. Davidson and revert
to the general case) possesses enough share in the divine gift to be
called "poet," we may, if we are bent upon truly "appreciating" him,
proceed to taste his lines over and over, to dwell in detail upon his
expression, upon its charms and splendours and felicities, its vigour
and terseness and simplicity. It may be that we shall find our first
admiration continually increased, especially when we learn to realise
the full music of the verse, the subtle tones of its "flutes and soft
recorders," or the swell of the "organ-voice." We may come to taste "all
the charms of all the Muses often flowering in one lonely word." It
might be, on the other hand, that we should detect a certain
over-fulness--what Coleridge has called a too-muchness--of diction; or a
certain want of correspondence between the melodious language and any
clearly apprehended mental picture. We might find the vigour too often
lapsing into sheer bad taste, or the simplicity taking the fatal step
into simpledom, as when Tennyson ends the story of Enoch Arden with the
banal remark that

the little port
Had seldom seen a costlier funeral.

We might, unhappily, discover these things, or, on the contrary, we
might find them so rare that our admiration at the expressive genius of
the poet would increase, until we were sure that the thing of beauty was
really and truly a superlative joy for ever.

And not only in diction and melody, but in that supreme Shakespearian
poetic gift of imagination which can vividly portray, body forth in
clear form, what others can only feel in a vague and misty way while
lacking the power to express it--in this gift also the great poet is
known, not at the first reading, nor at the second, nor at the third. An
image, a metaphor, which seems most perfect when first met, may lose
much of its apparent completeness and depth when t