"On many a mountain's happy head
Dawn lightly laid her rosy hand.
The adventurous son took heaven by storm,
Clouds scattered largesses of rain."
Davidson later became an offensively shrill preacher of materialism and lost his early charm. Some of the best of his poetry may be found in Fleet Street Ecologues.
Francis Thompson (1860-1907), a Catholic poet, who has been called a nineteenth-century Crashaw, passed much of his short life of suffering in London, where he was once reduced to selling matches on a street corner. His greatest poem, The Hound of Heaven (1893), is an impassioned lyrical rendering of the passage in the Psalms beginning: "Whither shall I go from thy Spirit? or whither shall I flee from thy presence?" While fleeing down "the long savannahs of the blue," the poet hears a Voice say:—
"Naught shelters thee, who wilt not shelter Me."
William Watson (1858- ), a London poet, looked to Milton, Wordsworth, and Arnold as his masters. Some of Watson's best verse, such as Wordsworth's Grave, is written in praise of dead poets. His early volume Epigrams (1884), containing one hundred poems of four lines each, shows his power of conveying poetic thought in brief space. One of these poems is called Shelley and Harriet Westbrook:—
"A star looked down from heaven and loved a flower,
Grown in earth's garden—loved it for an hour:
Let eyes that trace his orbit in the spheres
Refuse not, to a ruin'd rosebud, tears."[4]
Many expected to see Watson appointed poet-laureate to succeed Tennyson. Possibly mental trouble, which had temporarily affected him, influenced the choice; for Alfred Austin (1835-1913) received the laureateship in 1896. Like the Pre-Raphaelites, Watson disliked those whom he called a "phrase-tormenting fantastic chorus of poets." His best verse shows depth of poetic thought, directness of expression, and a strong sense of moral values.
The Victorian age has provided poetry to suit almost all tastes. In striking contrast with those who wrestled with the eternal verities are such poets and essayists as Austin Dobson (1840- ), long a clerk of the London Board of Trade, and Arthur Symons (1865- ), a poet and discriminating prose critic. Austin Dobson, who is fond of eighteenth-century subjects, is at his best in graceful society verse. His poems show the touch of a highly skilled metrical artist who has been a careful student of French poetry. His ease of expression, freshness, and humor charm readers of his verse without making serious demands on their attention. His best poems are found in Vignettes in Rhyme (1873), At the Sign of the Lyre (1885), and Collected Poems (1913).
In choice of subject matter, Arthur Symons sometimes suggests the Cavalier poets. He has often squandered his powers in acting on his theory that it is one of the provinces of verse to record any momentary mood, irrespective of its value. His deftness of touch and acute poetic sensibility are evident in such short poems as Rain on the Down, Credo, A Roundel of Rest and The Last Memory.[5]
[Illustration: DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI. From the drawing by himself,
National Portrait Gallery.]