into
universal truths; how he is the poet of wickedness, while yet every fibre
of him is sound and good; how his page is burdened with the material, the
real, the contemporary, while yet his hold upon the ideal, the spiritual,
never relaxes; how he is the poet of the body, while yet he is in even
fuller measure the poet of the soul; in fact, how all contradictions are
finally reconciled in him,--all these things and more, I say, I feel that
I have not set forth with the clearness and emphasis the subject demanded.
Other students of him will approach him on other lines, and will disclose
meanings that I have missed.

Writing about him, as Symonds said, is enormously difficult. At times I
feel as if I was almost as much at sea with regard to him as when I first
began to study him; not at sea with regard to his commanding genius and
power, but with regard to any adequate statement and summary of him in
current critical terms. One cannot define and classify him as he can a
more highly specialized poetic genius. What is he like? He is like
everything. He is like the soil which holds the germs of a thousand forms
of life; he is like the grass, common, universal, perennial, formless; he
is like your own heart, mystical yearning, rebellious, contradictory, but
ever throbbing with life. He is fluid, generative, electric; he is full of
the germs, potencies, and latencies of things; he provokes thought without
satisfying it; he is formless without being void; he is both Darwinian and
Dantesque. He is the great reconciler, he united and harmonized so many
opposites in himself. As a man he united the masculine and feminine
elements in a remarkable degree; he united the innocent vanity of the
child with the self-reliance of a god. In his moral aspects, he united
egoism and altruism, pride and charity, individualism and democracy,
fierce patriotism and the cosmopolitan spirit; in his literary aspects he
united mysticism and realism, the poet and prophet, the local and the
universal; in his religious aspects he united faith and agnosticism, the
glorification of the body and all objective things, with an unshakable
trust in the reality of the invisible world.

Rich in the elements of poetry, a London critic says, almost beyond any
other poet of his time, and yet the conscious, elaborate, crystallic,
poetic work which the critic demanded of him, carefully stopping short of,
quite content to hold it all in solution, and give his reader a