to be put to silence--to silence of a kind that would be impossible were
they less glorious--are testimonies to the difference between sacrifice
and waste.

But does it seem less than reasonable to begin a review of a poet's work
with praise of an infrequent mood? Infrequent such a mood must needs be,
yet it is in a profound sense characteristic. To have attained it once
or twice is to have proved such gift and grace as a true history of
literature would show to be above price, even gauged by the rude measure
of rarity. Transcendent simplicity could not possibly be habitual. Man
lives within garments and veils, and art is chiefly concerned with making
mysteries of these for the loveliness of his life; when they are rent
asunder it is impossible not to be aware that an overwhelming human
emotion has been in action. Thus _Departure_, _If I were Dead_,
_A Farewell_, _Eurydice_, _The Toys_, _St. Valentine's
Day_--though here there is in the exquisite imaginative play a
mitigation of the bare vitality of feeling--group themselves apart as the
innermost of the poet's achievements.

Second to these come the Odes that have splendid thought in great images,
and display--rather than, as do the poems first glanced at, betray--the
beauties of poetic art. Emotion is here, too, and in shocks and throes,
never frantic when almost intolerable. It is mortal pathos. If any
other poet has filled a cup with a draught so unalloyed, we do not know
it. Love and sorrow are pure in _The Unknown Eros_; and its author
has not refused even the cup of terror. Against love often, against
sorrow nearly always, against fear always, men of sensibility
instantaneously guard the quick of their hearts. It is only the approach
of the pang that they will endure; from the pang itself, dividing soul
and spirit, a man who is conscious of a profound capacity for passion