heir raptures. Here is no humiliation in ready-made
lendings; their ecstasy becomes him. He is glorious with them, and we
can imagine this benign and indulgent Nature confounding together the
sons she embraces, and making her poets--the primary and the secondary,
the greater and the lesser--all equals in her arms. Let us see him in
that company where he looks noble amongst the noble; let us not look upon
him in the company of the ignoble, where he looks ignobler still, being
servile to them; let us look upon him with the lyrical Shakespeare, with
Vaughan, Blake, Wordsworth, Patmore, Meredith; not with Baudelaire and
Gautier; with the poets of the forest and the sun, and not with those of
the alcove. We can make peace with him for love of them; we can imagine
them thankful to him who, poor and perverse in thought in so many pages,
could yet join them in such a song as this:

And her heart sprang in Iseult, and she drew
With all her spirit and life the sunrise through,
And through her lips the keen triumphant air
Sea-scented, sweeter than land-roses were,
And through her eyes the whole rejoicing east
Sun-satisfied, and all the heaven at feast
Spread for the morning; and the imperious mirth
Of wind and light that moved upon the earth,
Making the spring, and all the fruitful might
And strong regeneration of delight
That swells the seedling leaf and sapling man.

He, nevertheless, who was able, in high company, to hail the sea with
such fine verse, was not ashamed, in low company, to sing the famous
absurdities about "the lilies and languors of virtue and the roses and
raptures of vice," with many and many a passage of like character. I
think it more generous, seeing I have differed so much from the
Nineteenth Century's chorus of excessive praise, to quote little from the
vacant, the paltry, the silly--no word is so fit as that last little
word--among his pages. Therefore, I have justified my praise, but not my
blame. It is for the reader to turn to the justifying pages: to "A Song
of Italy," "Les Noyades," "Hermaphroditus," "Satia te Sanguine," "Kissing
her Hair," "An Interlude," "In a Garden," or such a stanza as the one
beginning

O thought illimitable and infinite heart
Whose blood is life in limbs indissolute
That all keep heartless thine invisible part
And inextirpable thy viewless root
Whence all sweet shafts of green and each thy dart
Of sharpening leaf