ention until the poetry returns. Essential poetry is an essence
too strong for the general sense; diluted, it can be endured; and, for
the most part, the poets dilute it. Poe could conceive of it only in the
absolute; and his is the counsel of perfection, if of a perfection
almost beyond mortal powers. He sought for it in the verse of all poets;
he sought, as few have ever sought, to concentrate it in his own verse;
and he has left us at least a few poems, '_ciascun distinto e di fulgore
e d'arte_,' in which he has found, within his own limits, the absolute.

1906.

THOMAS LOVELL BEDDOES

With the strange fortune that always accompanied him, in life and in
death, Beddoes has not merely escaped the indiscriminate applause which
he would never have valued, but he has remained a bibliographical rather
than a literary rarity. Few except the people who collect first
editions--not, as a rule, the public for a poet--have had the chance of
possessing _Death's Jest-Book_ (1850) and the _Poems_ (1851). At last
Beddoes has been made accessible, the real story of his death, that
suicide so much in the casual and determined manner of one of his own
characters.

'The power of the man is immense and irresistible.' Browning's emphatic
phrase comes first to the memory, and remains always the most
appropriate word of eulogy. Beddoes has been rashly called a great poet.
I do not think he was a great poet, but he was, in every sense of the
word, an astonishing one. Read these lines, and remember that they were
written just at that stagnant period (1821-1826) which comes between the
period of Keats, Shelley, and Byron, and the period of Browning and
Tennyson. It is a murderer who speaks:

I am unsouled, dishumanised, uncreated;
My passions swell and grow like brutes conceived;
My feet are fixing roots, and every limb
Is billowy and gigantic, till I seem
A wild, old, wicked mountain in the air:
And the abhorred conscience of this murder,
It will grow up a lion, all alone,
A mighty-maned, grave-mouthed prodigy,
And lair him in my caves: and other thoughts,
Some will be snakes, and bears, and savage wolves,
And when I lie tremendous in the desert,
Or abandoned sea, murderers and idiot men
Will come to live upon my rugged sides,
Die, and be buried in me. Now it comes;
I break, and magnify, and lose my form,
And yet I shall be taken for a man,