" He is certainly not the--
Pathetic singer, with no strength to sing,
as he says of the white-throat on the tulip-tree,
Whose leaves unfinished ape her faulty song.
In effect, a large compass of beautiful thought and expression, from
poetry old and new, have become to him matter malleable anew for a
further and finer reach of literary art. And with the perfect grace
of an intaglio, he shows, as in truth the minute intaglio may do, the
faculty of structure, the logic of poetry. "The New Endymion" is a
good instance of such sustained [113] power. Poetic scholar!--If we
must reserve the sacred name of "poet" to a very small number, that
humbler but perhaps still rarer title is due indisputably to Mr.
Gosse. His work is like exquisite modern Latin verse, into the
academic shape of which, discreet and coy, comes a sincere, deeply
felt consciousness of modern life, of the modern world as it is. His
poetry, according with the best intellectual instincts of our
critical age, is as pointed out recently by a clever writer in the
Nineteenth Century, itself a kind of exquisite, finally revised
criticism.
Not that he fails in originality; only, the graces, inborn certainly,
but so carefully educated, strike one more.
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