a sunbeam with motes.

There is an old saying that the workman may be known by his chips:
surely from these chips we may gather a high opinion of that artificer
who left such fragments to testify for him. For imaginative power of a
very high order, for the true tragic spirit, for exquisitely melodious
versification, for that faculty of song which is the flower of the lyric
genius, Beddoes was pre-eminently distinguished. Nor for these alone.
His style is based upon the rich vocabulary of the old dramatists, and
is terse, pregnant and quaint, without any trace of affectation. There
was a sturdy genuineness about the man that forbade him to assume, and
his phraseology was the natural outgrowth of his mind and his early
education. He has not gone to work, like so many of our modern
pre-Raphaelite painters, to imitate crudeness of form in the vain hope
of acquiring thereby earnestness and innocence of spirit; but he has
studied the best tragic models in a reverent spirit, and allowed his
muse to work out her own salvation. That grim ironical humor which
infuses such bitter strength into the speeches of Isbrand was always
scoffing at his own verses, and nipping the blossoms of his genius in
the bud. "I believe I might have met with some success as a retailer of
small coal," he writes to Mr. Kelsall, "or a writer of long-bottomed
tracts, but doubt of my aptitude for any higher literary or commercial
occupation."

His greatest weakness as a writer of tragedy has already been mentioned
as one of which he was himself but too well aware--his inability to
create characters that should have any more individual existence than as
the mouthpieces of various sentiments. While holding that the proper aim
of the dramatic writer should be to write for the stage, his dramas are
nevertheless fitted only for the closet. "If it were possible," said
George Darley (in the _London Magazine_, December, 1823), "speaking of a
work of this kind (_The Brides' Tragedy_), to make a distinction between
the _vis tragica_ and the _vis dramatica_, I should say that he
possessed much of the former, but little of the latter." As the beauties
of his style--and they are many--recall to us the Shakespearian writers
and the matchless riches of their verse, so do its faults--which are
few--reflection that the author was unsuccessful because the critic was
great. All critics, however, do not aspire to create, but all poets
sooner or later attempt to criticise. Ba