Why should I go on to quote such lines as--

That thousand-memoried unimpulsive sea,

or,

Curls the labyrinthine sea
Duteous to the lunar will.

Enough that, thanks to a study of Spenser, Milton, Shelley, Keats,
Wordsworth, Tennyson, and therefore a delicate taste in word and phrase,
and thanks also to an innate genius for verbal music, restrained from
Swinburnian riot by a true artistic instinct, Mr. Watson is a poet most
delightful to the physical and the mental ear. That he has taken pains
with his study is avowed by himself. Beginning with Shelley and passing
through Keats to Wordsworth, he says--

In my young days of fervid poesy
He drew me to him with his strange far light,--
He held me in a world all clouds and gleams,
And vasty phantoms, where ev'n Man himself
Moved like a phantom 'mid the clouds and gleams.
Anon the Earth recalled me; and a voice
Murmuring of dethroned divinities
And dead times, deathless upon sculptured urn--
And Philomela's long-descended pain
Flooding the night--and maidens of romance
To whom asleep St. Agnes' love-dreams come--
Awhile constrained me to a sweet duresse
And thraldom, lapping me in high content,
Soft as the bondage of white amorous arms.
And then a third voice, long unheeded--held
Claustral and cold, and dissonant and tame--Found
me at last with ears to hear. It sang
Of lowly sorrows and familiar joys,
Of simple manhood, artless womanhood,
And childhood fragrant as the limpid morn;
And from the homely matter nigh at hand,
Ascending and dilating, it disclosed
Spaces and avenues, calm heights and breadths
Of vision, whence I saw each blade of grass
With roots that groped about eternity,
And in each drop of dew upon each blade
The mirror of the inseparable All.

It is also clear from such reminiscences as--

The laurel glorious from that wintry hair,

which is practically Tennyson, or

The maker of this verse, which shall endure
By splendour of its theme, that cannot die,

which, if I mistake not, is echoed Spenser, or--

And ghostly as remembered mirth,

which is largely Tennyson again.

I do not call these plagiarisms, I call them reflections of wide and
retentive reading.

William Watson has thus formed a style which is almost perfect. I say
"almost," not quite. There are some few mannerisms which we might wish
away. He speaks of "greatly inert," "greatly lost in thee," "greatly