slain," "doomed splendidly to die," "loudly weak," "immutably prevail,"
and "vainly great," till we are forced to recognize what looks very
much like a trick. He has occasional moments of tautology, which may
possibly be deliberate, but is none the better for that, as when he
says:--

Not mine the rich and showering hand, that strews
The facile largess of a stintless muse.

And

The retrospect in Time's reverted eyes.

And worst of all--

"Fair clouds of gulls that _wheel_ and _swerve_
In unanimity divine,
With _undulation serpentine_,
And wondrous consentaneous _curve_."

He sometimes falls into lines which ring of the mint of Pope--

No guile may capture and no force surprise.

Or--

Defames the sunlight and deflowers the morn.

Or--

Towers to a lily, reddens to a rose.

In one passage only do I find him falling, falling, falling into the
flattest style of the _Excursion_:--

"I overheard a kind-eyed girl relate
To her companions how a favouring chance
By some few shillings weekly had increased
The earnings of her household."

But as I read this, I murmur to myself those lines from Wordsworth--

"And I have travelled far as Hull to see
What clothes he might have left, or other property,"

and wonder how it is that such aberrations can befal even the very man
who seems most determined to avoid them.

Watson's second endowment is still one of taste and intellect. It is the
gift of literary criticism. The special charm of the great poets is so
subtly apprehended by him, and so exquisitely expressed, that it will be
a source of much surprise if many of his concise verdicts do not become
the household words of students of literature. Let me quote a passage
from his poem on _Wordsworth's Grave_:--

You who have loved, like me, his simple themes,
Loved his sincere large accent nobly plain,
And loved the land whose mountains and whose streams
Are lovelier for his strain.

It may be that his manly chant, beside
More dainty numbers, seems a rustic tune;
It may be, thought has broadened, since he died,
Upon the century's noon;
It may be that we can no longer share
The faith which from his fathers he received;
It may be that our doom is to despair
Where he with joy believed;--

Enough that there is none since risen who sings
A song so gotten of the immediate soul,
So instant from the vital fount of things
Which is