s fancy in words like these:--

When, as yonder, thy mistress, at height of her mutable glories,
Wise from the magical East, comes like a sorceress pale.
Ah, she comes, she arises--impassive, emotionless, bloodless,
Wasted and ashen of cheek, zoning her ruins with pearl.
Once she was warm, she was joyous, desire in her pulses abounding:
Surely thou lovedst her well, then, in her conquering youth!
Surely not all unimpassioned, at sound of thy rough serenading,
She from the balconied night unto her melodist leaned,--
Leaned unto thee, her bondsman, who keepest to-day her commandments,
All for the sake of old love, dead at thy heart though it lie.

Surely such verse would have a claim to endurance, even if the thought
were less of a thought than it is.

_Autumn_, again, is a short piece upon the suggestions of that season.
What would those suggestions naturally be? Obviously, the passing and
perishing of all things that are. True; but to express those
suggestions, obvious as they are, as Watson expresses them, requires a
rhetorical power and a taste in melodious words such as would make their
possessor eminent in the judgment of men who care anything for beauty.
There may be no particular depth in the work; it may be less passionate,
less full of thought, than the _Ode to the West Wind_, but we could ill
afford to spare such combinations of sound as--

Elusive notes in wandering wafture borne
From undiscoverable lips, that blow
An immaterial horn.

In _Liberty Rejected_ we meet once more with the similitude of the moon
and the tide. Mr. Watson's range of purely intellectual imagination is,
like that of his emotion, limited. But we do not mind meeting the
comparison again, when the lover who refuses to be free expresses
himself thus--

The ocean would as soon
Entreat the moon
Unsay the magic verse
That seals him hers
From silver noon to noon.

When he touches upon nature, we feel again that Watson is not "letting
himself go." When he escapes from town it is not to revel and to make us
revel in the sheer delight of rural sights and sounds. He feels as
before, with the eye and the understanding, not with the buoyant blood
of the full heart. No matter, he feels enough to give us this quatrain--

In stainless daylight saw the pure seas roll;
Saw mountains pillaring the perfect sky:
Then journeyed home to carry in his soul
The torment of the difference till he die.