, humbly, shrinkingly, in dread
Of fires too splendid to be borne--
In expectation lest my head
Be from its Orphic shoulders torn--

I wait, till, down the eastern sky,
Muses, like Maenads in a throng,
Sweep my decayed traditions by,
In startling tunes of unknown song.

In the 350 pages of the _Collected Poems_ there is nothing which were
better omitted. Even the mere literary experiments, the rondeaus, the
sestinas--the literary jokes in which every poet indulges--are neatly
turned. Mr. Gosse has attempted, and succeeded with, a great variety
of metres. His diction is almost unfailingly good; indeed, it is the
very regularity and faultlessness of his verse that sometimes jars. It
is the work of a man many-sided in his nature, many-sided in his
moods. He can find himself in the atmosphere of a Coleridge, a
Wordsworth, a Keats, a Rossetti, a Beranger, and often his form
insensibly glides into that of the precursor whose spirit he for the
moment assimilates. He is by no means a mere imitator. His feeling is
his own; but his genius seems to be rather assimilative than strictly
creative. Scores of his poems have the beauty and the value of the
literature written by the great poets, when they were not in their
greatest moods.

And perhaps it is precisely the many-sidedness of Mr. Gosse's tastes
and interests which has left him so few decisive poetic successes. He
has ranged through literature with a catholic taste. He has helped to
create reputations--the reputations, for instance, of Ibsen and
Stevenson. There have been many calls upon his literary instinct, and
it is not surprising that the most uniformly successful of his poems
are those in praise of the great men of letters whom, with his faculty
for friendship, he made his friends. In the poems on these men--Ibsen,
Ruskin, Stevenson, Henry Sidgwick, Rossetti, and unnamed friends who
have departed--there is dignity, fineness, and the pathos of a regret
for that which he shared with them, though he lacked the power, or
more probably the opportunity, fully to express it.

But not in vain beneath this lofty shade
I danced awhile, frail plaything of the seas;
Unfit to brave the ampler main with these;
Yet, by the instinct which their souls obeyed,
Less steadfast, o'er the trackless wave I strayed,
And follow still their vanishing trestle-trees.

The beauties of literature, of many kinds and in many la