bsolutely flawless.
But allowing that it expresses perfectly what it sets out to express,
I yet doubt if it deserve the place assigned to it by Mr. Bridges.
Expression counts for a great deal: but ideas perhaps count for more.
And in the value of the ideas expressed I cannot see that 'Autumn' comes
near to rivalling the 'Nightingale' (for instance) or 'Melancholy.'
The thought that Autumn has its songs as well as Spring has neither the
rarity nor the subtlety nor the moral value of the thought that:

"In the very temple of Delight
Veil'd Melancholy has her sovran shrine,
Though seen of none save him whose strenuous tongue
Can burst joy's grape against his palate fine;
His soul shall taste the sadness of her might,
And be among her cloudy trophies hung."

To test it in another way:--It is perfect, no doubt: but it has not the
one thing that now and then in poetry rises (if I may use the paradox)
above perfection. It does not contain, as one or two of the Odes contain,
what I may call the Great Thrill. It nowhere compels that sudden
'silent, upon a peak in Darien' shiver, that awed surmise of the magic of
poetry which arrests one at the seventh stanza of the 'Nightingale' or
before the closing lines of 'Psyche.' Such verse as:

"Perhaps the self-same song hath found a path
Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home,
She stood in tears amid the alien corn;
The same that oft-times hath
Charm'd magic casements, opening on the foam
Of perilous seas in faery lands forlorn--"

Reaches beyond technical perfection to the very root of all tears and joy.
Such verse links poetry to Love itself--

"Half angel and half bird,
And all a wonder and a wild desire."

The 'Ode on a Grecian Urn' does not perhaps quite reach this divine
thrill: but its second and third stanzas have a rapture that comes very
near to it (I will speak anon of the fourth stanza): and I should not
quarrel with one who preferred these two stanzas even to the close of
'Psyche.'

Now it seems to me that the mere touching of this poetic height--the mere
feat of causing this most exquisite vibration in the human nerves--gives a
poem a quality and a rank apart; a quality and a rank not secured to
'Autumn' by all its excellence of expression. I grant, of course, that it
takes two to produce this thrill--the reader as well as t