in freshness and in perfume as the years go by.

The poems have the distinction of making one wish to be acquainted with their authors. [viii]Though they differ a good deal in mental tone, perhaps also somewhat in literary merit, they possess marked common characteristics: a restrained refinement, a subdued reserve, a gentle melancholy; the note of the latest Anglican æsthetic school. We find no humour, no Sturm und Drang, no inequalities and incoherences of passion. Even where it is obvious that the emotion has been intense, possibly of a rare and peculiar strain, as in Mr. Binyon's "Testamentum Amoris" and Mr. Phillips's "To a Lost Love," the expression of it obeys no violence of impulse. A tender tone of regret, rather than of acute grief, steeps these stanzas (to quote one instance) addressed to a friend removed into the spiritual world by death.

[viii]

"Oh, thou art cold! In that high sphere

Thou art a thing apart,

Losing in saner happiness

This madness of the heart.

[ix]

"And yet, at times, thou still shalt feel

A passing breath, a pain;

Disturb'd, as though a door in heaven

Had oped and closed again.

"And thou shalt shiver, while the hymns,

The solemn hymns, shall cease;

A moment half remember me;

Then turn away to peace."

 Prev. P 2/44 next