One notes in Mr. Upson’s work a restraint that is the apogee of good taste. He conveys the mood, whether of love or other emotion,
and makes his feeling another’s, but the veil of the temple is never wholly rent; one may but divine the ministries and sacrifices of its altar. He is an idealist, not yet come to the place of disillusion; though wandering at times near to the border of that chilly realm, he wraps his seamless robe of dreams more closely about him and turns back. Mr. Upson is not, however, an unthinking singer to whom all is cheer because he has not the insight to enter into those phases of life that have not yet touched him; on the contrary, his note is not a blithe one, it is meditative, inclining to the philosophical, and tinctured with a certain pensiveness.
Now and again the cosmos thrusts forward a suggestion which becomes the motive of one of the Octaves, as when the garden breeze loosens from the chink a
… measure of earth
To match my body’s dust when its rebirth
To sod restores old functions I forsook,—
which, in turn, induces a reflection upon the microcosm:
Strange that a sod for just a thrill or two
Should ever be seduced into the round
Of change in which its present state is found