self distressed by such
cacophonies as--

Hid in its hoard of haws,

and--

Pierces a rushlight's ray's length into it.

John Davidson, then, is a genuine son of his age; free in his thought,
wide in his sympathies, eager for the amelioration of man's estate,
divided between the hopes of science and the regret for a lost religion,
compelled to fall back on the everlasting consolations of love and
nature, an ardent lover of the country and its sights and sounds,
constrained to draw word-pictures of the things which thus delight him,
and drawing them with the consummate skill of the man who keeps his eye
on the essentials of the thing he draws. His charm lies in his frank
sincerity, and in the clear healthy sweetness of his utterance. That he
is a poet none can doubt; if he is comparatively young, as I surmise he
is, and if he pursues his true development, he may, I believe, easily
take his place in the first rank, not only as a successor, but as the
successor, of Tennyson.

On William Watson I shall dwell less long. To begin with, he is already
better known. Moreover, his special virtues as a poet are more easy to
apprehend, for they lie somewhat prominently upon the surface. Better
still, he apparently apprehends them himself, and is in that unusually
happy position for an artist, of knowing exactly where his own strength
lies. And undoubtedly in those departments his strength is great. We
need not hold the mention of them in reserve. I have already quoted a
passage of admirable rhetorical and musical skill and taste from the
_Lachrymae Musarum_. That was sufficient to illustrate one of this
poet's great gifts--the gift of writing splendid verse, as harmonious as
Milton's and as choice in expression as Tennyson's. His other chief
endowment is that of literary critic. On Burns, Shelley, and Wordsworth
he has said almost the final saying, and assuredly in almost the final
language. We may pick faults now and again in his expression, and we may
suspect a mannerism here and there, especially when we read large
quantities of his verse at one time; nevertheless, each individual piece
which fairly represents him is very nearly perfect in its way.

The works of his with which I am acquainted are the volumes entitled
_Wordsworth's Grave and Other Poems_, _The Father of the Forest and
Other Poems_, _Lachrymae Musarum_, and the series of sonnets upon
Armenia, called _The Purple East_. There is in Watson nothing of the