Indian Summer.
And at four-score the poet of St. Agnes’ Eve is still our greatest since the Wordsworth of certain sonnets and the two immortal odes: is still the one Englishman of whom it can be stated and believed that Elisha is not less than Elijah. His verse is far less smooth and less lustrous than in the well-filed times of In Memoriam and the Arthurian idylls. But it is also far more plangent and affecting; it shows a larger and more liberal mastery of form and therewith a finer, stronger, saner sentiment of material; in its display of breadth and freedom in union with particularity, of suggestiveness with precision, of swiftness of handling with completeness of effect, it reminds you of the later magic of Rembrandt and the looser and richer, the less artful-seeming but more ample and sumptuous, of the styles of Shakespeare. And the matter is worthy of the manner. Everywhere are greatness and a high imagination moving at ease in the gold
armour of an heroic style. There are passages in Demeter and Persephone that will vie with the best in Lucretius; Miriam is worth a wilderness of Aylmer’s Fields; Owd Roä is one of the best of the studies in dialect; in Happy there are stanzas that recall the passion of Rizpah; nothing in modern English so thrills and vibrates with the prophetic inspiration, the fury of the seer, as Vastness; the verses To Mary Boyle—(in the same stanza as Musset’s le Mie Prigioni)—are marked by such a natural grace of form and such a winning ‘affectionateness,’ to coin a word, of intention and accomplishment as Lord Tennyson has never surpassed nor very often equalled. In Vastness the insight into essentials, the command of primordial matter, the capacity of vital suggestion, are gloriously in evidence from the first line to the last. Here is no touch of ingenuity, no trace of ‘originality,’ no single sign of cleverness; the rhymes are merely inevitable—there is no visible transformation of metaphor in deference to their suggestions; nothing is antic, peculiar, superfluous; but here in epic unity and completeness, here is a sublimation of experience expressed by means of a sublimation of style. It is unique in English, and for all that one can see it is like to remain unique this good while yet. The impression you take is one of singular loftiness of purpose and a rare nobility of mind. Looking upon life and time and the spirit of man from the
heights of his eighty years, it has been given to the Master Poet to behold much that is hid to them in the plain or on the slopes beneath him, and beholding it to frame and utter a message so lofty in style and in significance so potent that it sounds as of this world indeed but from the confines of experience, the farthest kingdoms of mortality.