uch of
acrimony or peevishness. He never questioned the love or justice of God;
he never raged against fate, or railed at circumstance. He gathered up
the fragments with a quiet hand; he never betrayed envy or jealousy; he
never deplored the fact that he had not realised his own possibilities;
he suffered silently, he endured patiently.

And thus he is a deeply pathetic figure, because his great gifts and
high qualities never had full scope. He might have been a great
jurist, a great lawyer, a great professor, a great writer, a great
administrator; and he ended as a man of erratic genius, as a teacher in
a restricted sphere, though sowing, generously and prodigally, rich and
fruitful seed. With great poetical force of conception, and a style
both resonant and suggestive, he left a single essay of high genius, a
fantastic historical work, a few books of school exercises. A privately
printed volume of Letters and Journals reveals the extraordinary quality
of his mind, its delicacy, its beauty, its wistfulness, its charm. There
remains but the little volume of verse which is here presented, which
stands apart from the poetical literature of the age. We see in these
poems a singular and original contribution to the poetry of the century.
The verse is in its general characteristics of the school of Tennyson,
with its equable progression, its honied epithets, its soft cadences,
its gentle melody. But the poems are deeply original, because they,
combine a peculiar classical quality, with a frank delight in the spirit
of generous boyhood. For all their wealth of idealised sentiment, they
never lose sight of the fuller life of the world that waits beyond the
threshold of youth, the wider issues, the glory of the battle, the hopes
of the patriot, the generous visions of manhood. They are full of the
romance of boyish friendships, the echoes of the river and the cricket
field, the ingenuous ambitions, the chivalry, the courage of youth and
health, the brilliant charm of the opening world. These things are but
the prelude to, the presage of, the energies of the larger stage; his
young heroes are to learn the lessons of patriotism, of manliness, of
activity, of generosity, that they may display them in a wider field.
Thus he wrote in "A Retrospect of School Life":--

"Much lost I; something stayed behind,
A snatch, maybe, of ancient song.
Some breathings of a deathless mind,
Some love of truth, some hate of wrong.

And to m