I should think that "The Builders, A Nocturne in Westminster Abbey," most fully represents this poet's lyrical gift. Individual qualities of it may perhaps be observed more clearly elsewhere; but here they combine to produce an effect of meditative sweetness and stately, elegiac grace which are very characteristic. The poem is in ten movements, of very unequal length and irregular form. It is unrhymed, and stanzas may vary almost indefinitely in length, as the verse may pass from a dimeter, light or resonant, up through the intervening measures to the roll of the hexameter. But this originality of technique, leaving room for so many shades of thought and feeling, was certainly inspired; and below the changeful form runs perfect unity of tone. The creative impulse is subdued to the contemplative mood induced in the mind of the poet as she stands in the Abbey at night and broods upon its history. Her thought goes far back, to the early builders of the fabric whose pale phantoms seem to float in the shades of the 'grey ascending arches.'

When the stars are muffled and under them all the earth
Is a fiery fog and the sinister roar of London,
They lament for the toil of their hands, their souls' travail—
"Ah, the beautiful work!"
It was set to shine in the sun, to companion the stars
To endure as the hills, the ancient hills, endure,
Lo, like a brand
It lies, a brand consumed and blackened of fire,
In the fierce heart of London.

Or, like Dante, this poet will follow the old ghosts to a more dreadful region, and bring them news of home—

Fain would my spirit,
My living soul beat up the wind of death
To the inaccessible shore and with warm voice
Deep-resonant of the earth, salute the dead:

.....

I also would bring
To the old unheeded spirits news of Earth;
Of England, their own country, choose to tell them,
And how above St. Edward's bones the Minister
Gloriously stands, how it no more beholds
The silver Thames broadening among green meadows
And gardens green, nor sudden shimmer of streams
And the clear mild blue hills.
Rather so high it stands the whole earth under
Spreads boundless and the illimitable sea.

The steps of the sentry, pacing over the stones which cover the great dead below, remind her of those other builders who lie there, makers of Empire.

Over what dust the atom footfall passes!
Out of what distant lands, by what adventures
Superbly gathered
To lie so still in the unquiet heart of London!
Is not the balm of Africa yet clinging
About the bones of Livingstone? Consider
The long life-wandering, the strange last journey
Of this, the heroic lion-branded corpse,
Still urging to the sea!
And here the eventual far-off deep repose.

This poem is characteristic, both in the way it blends imagination and profound feeling with pensive thought, and in its literary flavour. One may note the opulent language, enriched from older sources, the historical lore and the allusive touch so fascinating to those who love literature for its own sake. But the poet can work at times in a very different manner. There is, for instance, another piece of unrhymed verse, "March Thoughts From England," which is a riot of light and colour, rich scent and lovely shape and bewitching sound—the sensuous rapture evoked by a Provençal scene 'recollected in tranquillity.' Or there is "April," with the keen joy of an English spring, also a glad response to the direct impressions of sense. Imagination is subordinated here; but if we turn in another direction we are likely to find it paramount. It may be manifested in such various degrees and through such different media that sharp contrasts will present themselves. Thus we might turn at once from the playful fancy of "The Child Alone" (where a little maid has escaped from mother and nurse into the wonderful, enchanted, adventurous world just outside the garden) to the thrice-heated fire of "Again I Saw Another Angel." Here imagination has fanned thought to its own fierce heat; and in the sudden flame serenity is shrivelled up and gives place to passionate despair. In a vision the poet sees the awful messenger of the Lord leap into the heavens with a great cry—

Then suddenly the earth was white
With faces turned towards his light.
The nations' pale expectancy
Sobbed far beneath him like the sea,
But men exulted in their dread,
And drunken with an awful glee
Beat at the portals of the dead.