(Pall Mall Gazette, March 13, 1885.)

In an age of hurry like ours the appearance of an epic poem more than
five thousand lines in length cannot but be regarded as remarkable.
Whether such a form of art is the one most suited to our century is a
question. Edgar Allan Poe insisted that no poem should take more than an
hour to read, the essence of a work of art being its unity of impression
and of effect. Still, it would be difficult to accept absolutely a canon
of art which would place the Divine Comedy on the shelf and deprive us of
the Bothwell of Mr. Swinburne. A work of art is to be estimated by its
beauty not by its size, and in Mr. Wills's Melchior there is beauty of a
rich and lofty character.

Remembering the various arts which have yielded up their secrets to Mr.
Wills, it is interesting to note in his poems, here the picturesque
vision of the painter, here the psychology of the novelist, and here the
playwright's sense of dramatic situation. Yet these things, which are
the elements of his work of art though we arbitrarily separate them in
criticism, are in the work itself blended and made one by the true
imaginative and informing power. For Melchior is not a piece of poetic
writing merely; it is that very rare thing, a poem.

It is dedicated to Mr. Robert Browning, not inappropriately, as it deals
with that problem of the possible expression of life through music, the
value of which as a motive in poetry Mr. Browning was the first to see.
The story is this. In one of the little Gothic towns of Northern Germany
lives Melchior, a dreamer and a musician. One night he rescues by chance
a girl from drowning and lodges her in a convent of holy women. He grows