is the pity, because, while, as I have said, one out-of-door
essay with little or even with nothing but the personality of the writer
may interest, or perhaps two such, or even ten, a book full will be
monotonous. At its best, however, his writing of "natural romance" is of
great beauty. "Still Waters," for one, is almost perfect, as perfect as
this sort of thing may be. It is wrought of his own experiences with
just enough of mythological data to give it the texture of old and
lasting things.

"The Rainy Hyades," on the other hand, is largely a rehash of folk-lore
notes, second-hand work with very little added from experience and very
little finely imagined or recaptured by way of ancestral memory. At
times it would seem that, poor, tired man, he had to feed his flagging
invention from a dictionary of quotations. So, it appears, he has done
in his "Winter Stars" as well as in "The Rainy Hyades." As I think over
the unevenness of these essays, the beauty of "Still Waters," and the
obviousness of these others, I am brought back again to wondering what
Sharp would have done had all his time been his to do as he would with.
Such wonderment is, of course, idle, idle as that as to what Keats would
have done had he lived, for a man's art is judged by what it is, with no
tempering of the appraisement by what the man's life has been.
Fortunately there is inspiring work in plenty in Sharp, in this, as in
other phases of his work, to make readers turn to him when interest in
him as a phenomenon of current literature has passed away. It is hard to
think of the time when writing so beautiful as that of "Still Waters"
will not be sought by lovers of beauty in words and by lovers of beauty
in landscape, and when the opening of "The Coming of Dusk" will not be
turned to, as the opening of Emerson's "Nature" is turned to to-day.

Were I to attempt to enumerate the critical writings of Sharp, from the
"Rossetti" of 1882 to "The Winged Destiny" of 1904, I should run up a
catalogue that would exceed any even of Walt Whitman's. For years Sharp
lived by criticism, as editor of "The Canterbury Poets" and as reviewer
for many of the London journals. To me none of this critical work is
significant until he came to write of the movement that carried him to
fame,--to fame, I say, because "Fiona Macleod" was famous for a decade,
and not only as a mystery, but as a revealer of a new beauty in words,
and as a widener of horizons.

I have, I thin