ught this morning morning's minion, kingdom of daylight's dauphin,
dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding
Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding
High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,
As a skate's heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and the gliding
Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding
Stirred for a bird,--the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!'

We have no doubt that 'stirred for a bird' was an added excellence to
the poet's ear; to our sense it is a serious blemish on lines which have
'the roll, the rise, the carol, the creation.'

There is no good reason why we should give characteristic specimens of
the poet's obscurity, since our aim is to induce people to read him. The
obscurities will slowly vanish and something of the intention appear;
and they will find in him many of the strange beauties won by men who
push on to the borderlands of their science; they will speculate whether
the failure of his whole achievement was due to the starvation of
experience which his vocation imposed upon him, or to a fundamental vice
in his poetical endeavour. For ourselves we believe that the former was
the true cause. His 'avant toute chose' whirling dizzily in a spiritual
vacuum, met with no salutary resistance to modify, inform, and
strengthen it. Hopkins told the truth of himself--the reason why he
must remain a poets' poet:--

I want the one rapture of an inspiration.
O then if in my lagging lines you miss
The roll, the rise, the carol, the creation,
My winter world, that scarcely yields that bliss
Now, yields you, with some sighs, our explanation.'

[JUNE, 1919.

_The Problem of Keats_

It is a subject for congratulation that a second edition of Sir Sidney
Colvin's life of Keats[6] has been called for by the public: first,
because it is a good, a very good book, and secondly, because all
evidence of a general curiosity concerning a poet so great and so
greatly to be loved must be counted for righteousness. The impassioned
and intimate sympathy which is felt--as we may at least conclude--by a
portion of the present generation for Keats is a motion of the
consciousness which stands in a right and natural order. Keats is with
us; and it argues much for a generous elasticity in Sir Sidney Colvin's
mind, which we have neither the right nor the custom to expect i