e devil in disguise. The
Rembrandt of _The Syndics_, the Shakespeare of _The Tempest_ and
_Lear_--what are these but pits for the feet of the Young Ass? and what
else will be the Tennyson of _Vastness_ and _The Gleam_? 'Lord,' quoth
Dickens years ago in respect of the _Idylls_ or of _Maud_, 'what a
pleasure it is to come across a man that can _write_!' He also was an
artist in words; and what he said then he would say now with greater
emphasis and more assurance. From the first Lord Tennyson has been an
exemplar; and now in these new utterances, his supremacy is completely
revealed. There is no fear now that 'All will grow the flower, For all
have got the seed'; for then it was a mannerism that people took and
imitated, and now--! Now it is art; it is the greater Shakespeare, the
consummate Rembrandt, the unique Velasquez; and they may rise to it that
can.

GORDON HAKE

Aim and Equipment.

Dr. Hake is one of the most earnest and original of poets. He has taken
nothing from his contemporaries, but has imagined a message for himself,
and has chosen to deliver it in terms that are wholly his own. For him
the accidents and trivialities of individualism, the transitory and
changing facts that make up the external aspect of an age or a character,
can hardly be said to exist. He only concerns himself with absolutes--the
eternal elements of human life and the immutable tides of human destiny.
It is of these that the stuff of his message is compacted; it is from
these that its essence is distilled. His talk is not of Arthur and
Guinevere, nor Chastelard and Atalanta, nor Paracelsus and Luria and Abt
Vogler; of 'the drawing-room and the deanery' he has nothing to say;
nothing of the tendencies of Strauss and Renan, nothing of the New
Renaissance, nothing of Botticelli, nor the ballet, nor the text of
Shakespeare, nor the joys of the book-hunter, nor the quaintness of Queen
Anne, nor the morals of Helen of Troy. To these he prefers the mystery
of death, the significance of life, the quality of human and divine love;
the hopes and fears and the joys and sorrows that are the perdurable
stuff of existence, the inexhaustible and unchanging principles of
activity in man. Now it is only to the few that reduced to their
simplest expression the 'eternal verities' are engaging and impressive.
To touch the many they must be conveyed in human terms; they must be
presented not as impersonal abstractions, not as matter