sometimes uncalled for, disenchanting, and even manufactured.

Look at his "Endymion." It is the earlier verses that win you:

"And silver white the river gleams
As if Diana in her dreams
Had dropt her silver bow
Upon the meadows low."

That is as good as Ronsard, and very like him in manner and matter. But
the moral and consolatory _application_ is too long--too much dwelt on:

"Like Dian's kiss, unasked, unsought,
Love gives itself, but is not bought."

Excellent; but there are four weak, moralizing stanzas at the close, and
not only does the poet "moralize his song," but the moral is feeble, and
fantastic, and untrue. There are, though he denies it, myriads of
persons now of whom it cannot be said that

"Some heart, though unknown,
Responds unto his own."

If it were true, the reflection could only console a school-girl.

A poem like "My Lost Youth" is needed to remind one of what the author
really was, "simple, sensuous, passionate." What a lovely verse this is,
a verse somehow inspired by the breath of Longfellow's favourite Finnish
"Kalevala," "a verse of a Lapland song," like a wind over pines and salt
coasts: