from "the brutish jargon we
inherit." He belonged to the hierarchy of the poets of all ages, and
pressed into his service lovely, half-forgotten words which made his
poetry seem strange and bizarre to those who were too much immersed in
the language and literature of their day. And those subtler minds who
instantly perceived its beauty, and saw how his language and his
imagery often recalled those of the seventeenth-century metaphysicals,
such as Crashaw, too readily perhaps asserted a bond between his
thought and theirs. Like them, it is true, he turned his back on the
delusive splendours of the world; he accepted and expressed in song
the divine ordinance of the universe. But he was afflicted with the
pain of modern doubt; fear and speculative curiosity struggled with
his faith; sometimes the sheer beauty of the external world, so far
from proving the divine beauty, seemed to him as a possible refuge in
his vain flight from the "Hound of Heaven."

He cannot be allocated to a single school. In his reading he had
ranged through the poets of all ages, and he had assimilated a mighty
variety of emotions, and we may see how his form shows the influence
now of one poet, now another--Milton, Cowley, Shelley, Hood, Poe, and
Rossetti--yet each influence, as it came upon him, was passed through
the crucible of his own defined temperament, and the resultant is
wholly his own, a creature which speaks of half-suppressed emotion,
yet fantastically rich in phrase, rhythm, and image. His study of all
the poets seems to have opened to him more avenues of beauty than were
open to any poet of the middle seventeenth century. There is in his
blood the fantastical romance of the Elizabethans; the love of
spiritual contemplation which marked the seventeenth-century mystic;
the passionate adoration of Nature and the open air which came with
the early nineteenth century; modern introspectiveness; and that habit
of symbolism with which Rossetti and his school have made us familiar.

Sometimes his pregnant phrases, his literary imagery, his stately,
sweeping rhetoric, and the note of underlying melancholy would lead us
to compare him with Virgil rather than with any modern poet.

Under this dreadful brother uterine,
This kinsman feared, Tellus, behold me come,
Thy son stern-nursed; who mortal-mother-like,
To turn thy weanlings' mouth averse, embitter'st,
Thine over-childed breast. Now, mortal-sonlike,
I thou hast suc