"Before whose unseen presence the leaves, dead,
Are driven like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing,"
and he can describe a skylark in the heavens as
"Like a poet hidden
In the light of thought."
Of all English poets he is the most completely lyrical. Nothing that he wrote but is wrought out of the anguish or joy of his own heart.
"Most wretched souls,"
he writes
"Are cradled into poetry by wrong
They learn in suffering what they teach in song."
Perhaps his work is too impalpable and moves in an air too rarefied. It sometimes lacks strength. It fails to take grip enough of life. Had he lived he might have given it these things; there are signs in his last poems that he would have given it. But he could hardly have bettered the sheer and triumphant lyricism of
The Skylark
, of some of his choruses, and of the