have asked it.

"And the further particular question, Is Mr. Meredith a persuasive poet?
will be answered as promptly by us. He can be--let us grant--a plaguily
forbidding one. His philosophy is not easy; yet it seems to me a deal
easier than many of his single verses. I hope humbly, for instance, one
of these days, to discover what is meant by such a verse as this:--

"'Thou animatest ancient tales,
To prove our world of linear seed;
Thy very virtue now assails
A tempter to mislead.'

"Faint, yet pursuing, I hope; but I must admit that such writing does not
obviously allure, that it rather dejects the student by the difficulty of
finding a stool to sit down and be stoical on. 'Nay,' to parody Sidney,
'he dooth as if your journey should lye through a fayre Vineyard, at the
first give you a handful of nuts, forgetting the nut-crackers.' He is, in
short, half his time forbiddingly difficult, and at times to all
appearance so deliberately and yet so wantonly difficult, that you wonder
what on earth you came out to pursue and why you should be tearing your
flesh in these thickets.

"And then you remember the swinging cadences of 'Love in the Valley'
--the loveliest love-song of its century. Who can forget it?

"'Lovely are the curves of the white owl sweeping
Wavy in the dusk lit by one large star,
Lone on the fir-branch, his rattle-note unvaried,
Brooding o'er the gloom, spins the brown evejar.
Darker grows the valley, more and more forgetting;
So were it with me if forgetting could be willed.
Tell the grassy hollow that holds the bubbling well-spring,
Tell it to forget the source that keeps it filled.'

"And you swear that no thickets can be so dense but you will wrestle
through them in the hope of hearing that voice again, or even an echo of
it.

"'Melampus,' 'The Nuptials of Attila,' 'The Day of the Daughter of Hades,'
'The Empty Purse,' 'Jump-to-Glory Jane,' and the splendid 'Phoebus with
Admetus'--you come back to each again and again, compelled by the wizardry
of single lines and by a certain separate glamour which hangs about each
of them. Each of them is remembered by you as in its own way a superb
performance; lines here and there so haunt you with their beauty that you
must go back and read the whole poem over for the sake of them. Other
lines you boggle over, and yet cannot forget them; you hope to like them
better at