es which is the draughtsmanship
of painting, by the whole quality of the workmanship, the arabesque of
the design, the splendour of the colour, for these things are enough to
stir the most divine and remote of the chords which make music in our
soul, and colour, indeed, is of itself a mystical presence on things, and
tone a kind of sentiment.

This, then--the new departure of our younger school--is the chief
characteristic of Mr. Rennell Rodd's poetry; for, while there is much in
his work that may interest the intellect, much that will excite the
emotions, and many-cadenced chords of sweet and simple sentiment--for to
those who love Art for its own sake all other things are added--yet, the
effect which they pre-eminently seek to produce is purely an artistic
one. Such a poem as The Sea-King's Grave, with all its majesty of melody
as sonorous and as strong as the sea by whose pine-fringed shores it was
thus nobly conceived and nobly fashioned; or the little poem that follows
it, whose cunning workmanship, wrought with such an artistic sense of
limitation, one might liken to the rare chasing of the mirror that is its
motive; or In a Church, pale flower of one of those exquisite moments
when all things except the moment itself seem so curiously real, and when
the old memories of forgotten days are touched and made tender, and the
familiar place grows fervent and solemn suddenly with a vision of the
undying beauty of the gods that died; or the scene in Chartres Cathedral,
sombre silence brooding on vault and arch, silent people kneeling on the
dust of the desolate pavement as the young priest lifts Lord Christ's
body in a crystal star, and then the sudden beams of scarlet light that
break through the blazoned window and smite on the carven screen, and
sudden organ peals of mighty music rolling and echoing from choir to
canopy, and from spire to shaft, and over all the clear glad voice of a
singing boy, affecting one as a thing over-sweet, and striking just the
right artistic keynote for one's emotions; or At Lanuvium, through the
music of whose lines one seems to hear again the murmur of the Mantuan
bees straying down from their own green valleys and inland streams to
find what honeyed amber the sea-flowers might be hiding; or the poem
written In the Coliseum, which gives one the same artistic joy that one
gets watching a handicraftsman at his work, a goldsmith hammering out his
gold into those thin plates as delicate as th