our source and goal;

And though at touch of later hands there float
More artful tones than from his lyre he drew,
Ages may pass e'er trills another note
So sweet, so great, so true.

Take again--

Not Milton's keen, translunar music thine;
Not Shakespeare's cloudless, boundless, human view;
Not Shelley's flush of rose on peaks divine;
Nor yet the wizard twilight Coleridge knew.

And these:--

Shelley, the hectic flamelight rose of verse,
All colour and all odour and all bloom.

And on Burns--

But as, when thunder crashes nigh,
All darkness opes one flaming eye,
And the world leaps against the sky,
So fiery clear
Did the old truths that we pass by
To him appear.

These, then, are the prominent poetical virtues of William Watson,
virtues which none can avoid observing--his magnificent power of
expression and his literary acumen. He is an intellectual poet, and
therefore not devoid of substance. Yet his substance alone would never
make him a _vates_. I can imagine that in prose criticisms and in satire
he would make a distinguished figure. Here is his answer to Mr. Alfred
Austin when the laureate advised him to be patient with the Armenian
question:--

"The poet laureate assured me--first, that whosoever in any
circumstances arraigns this country for anything that she may do or
leave undone thereby covers himself with shame; secondly, that although
the continued torture, rape, and massacre of a Christian people, under
the eyes of a Christian continent, may be a lamentable thing, it is best
to be patient, seeing that the patience of God Himself can never be
exhausted; and, thirdly, that if I were but with him in his pretty
country house, were but comfortably seated 'by the yule log's blaze,'
and joining with him in seasonable conviviality, the enigmas of
Providence and the whole mystery of things would presently become
transparent to me, and more especially after 'drinking to England' I
should be enabled to understand that 'she bides her hour behind the
bastioned brine.'"

It would be hard to better that.

But though I call him intellectual, and more artistic than inspired, I
have no wish to underrate the intrinsic poetry in such lines as these,
on the _Great Misgiving_:--

Ah, but the apparition--the dumb sign--
The beckoning finger bidding me forego
The fellowship, the converse, and the wine,
The songs, the festal glow!
And, ah, to know n